The silence that shapes us: A national security imperative

Nigeria has faced waves of violence in recent years, but the responses to these crises reveal something deeper about the country’s political and moral life. In this essay, K Bolanle Ati-John argues that the nation’s recurring silence in the face of communal and mob violence is not merely a social failing but a national security risk that weakens institutions and endangers citizens.

When Deborah Samuel, a young student in Sokoto, was lynched in 2022 after being accused of blasphemy, the violence was shocking. What followed was even more revealing. Despite viral videos identifying participants, the suspects faced only minor charges and were quickly released. The real indictment was not just of the mob, but of the silence that settled around the country afterward. The evasive statements, the softened condemnations, the careful distancing. It was a familiar choreography.

Nigeria has witnessed versions of this silence everywhere. In the South East, when armed groups kill traditional rulers or attack police stations, some leaders respond with cautious euphemism. In the Middle Belt, cycles of reprisal killings are often met with quiet negotiation rather than clear moral censure. In the South West, mob justice is sometimes narrated as community protection. In the South South, politically connected violence often disappears into the fog of grievance narratives.

The pattern is unmistakable. Perpetrators act publicly. Institutions respond weakly. Influential voices hesitate to speak plainly, especially when those involved are people considered to be from within the community.

This is not a northern problem or a religious problem. It is a Nigerian problem. The deeper question is national. Why does silence, political, religious, and communal, so often become the enabling condition for unlawful violence in Nigeria?

A conceptual lens helps answer this. It is what can be called the politics of moral impunity, a national architecture of silence that cuts across identity lines and allows violence to flourish.

Four dynamics reinforce this architecture.

The first is elite ambiguity. Political leaders, clerics, and cultural authorities routinely avoid moral clarity when perpetrators come from their constituencies. Silence becomes a strategy, not a lapse. The political theorist Mahmood Mamdani has observed that silence in the face of communal violence rarely signifies neutrality. It is a calculated means of preserving legitimacy.

The second is community level rationalization. Everywhere in Nigeria, communities reinterpret unlawful violence as something closer to virtue. Deborah’s killing was defended by some as protection of religious honour. In the South East, attacks on state institutions are recast as liberation. In the South West, lynching of alleged thieves is portrayed as swift justice. Communities do this not because they are inherently violent, but because they distrust a state that too often fails to provide justice or security. When institutions seem absent, people narrate their own violence as protection.

Across Islamic jurisprudence, Christian ethics, indigenous norms, and Nigeria’s constitutional order, vigilante killings remain impermissible. Wael Hallaq’s work on Sharia explains that even in contexts where blasphemy is recognized, it is adjudicated through due process rather than mob action. Rationalization is not culture. It is desperation in other words.

The third dynamic is institutional minimalism. This is the national reluctance to prosecute politically or communally sensitive crimes. Nigeria’s courts contain many abandoned cases. The 2016 killing of electoral officers in the South East never reached judgment. The masterminds of the 2018 Dapchi schoolgirl abductions were never tried. The 2020 Igangan massacre in Oyo State effectively ended without accountability. Numerous cases of police extrajudicial killings have evaporated after political pressure or institutional fatigue. Human Rights Watch has documented this pattern for nearly two decades. The more sensitive the case, the weaker the institutional resolve.

The final dynamic is the perception of permission. When violence is met with silence, rationalization, and institutional weakness, Nigerians draw the logical conclusion that nothing will happen. This perception fuels mob killings, banditry recruitment, police brutality, and political thuggery. It is the oxygen of civic decay.

Understanding these patterns as national, not regional, is crucial. It reduces defensiveness, expands accountability, and invites unified reform rather than fragmented blame. Nigeria cannot fix what it insists on treating as someone else’s problem.

So what can be done?

Moral clarity from leaders matters, but it is insufficient. Judicial reform is necessary, but familiar. Nigeria needs one distinctive structural intervention. It needs a permanent and independent national commission empowered to investigate and prosecute identity sensitive violence and shielded from political or communal influence.

Many divided democracies have created such institutions. South Africa’s Independent Police Investigative Directorate and Kenya’s Independent Policing Oversight Authority are examples. Nigeria once experimented with similar bodies but never insulated them from political capture. A credible commission with prosecutorial authority, guaranteed funding, and constitutional independence would send a clear message that crimes involving mobs, communal violence, or religious provocation cannot be negotiated into silence.

Such an institution would not replace the police or the courts. It would strengthen them precisely where they are weakest, in cases where politics, fear, and identity distort justice. Its existence would tell every Nigerian community that the law does not bend based on who commits the crime.

Yet institutions alone cannot repair a damaged moral ecosystem. Nigeria’s public narrative must also shift. Violence cannot remain something communities attempt to manage internally. Moral indignation cannot continue to follow ethnic and religious boundaries. A multi ethnic democracy survives only when citizens share a single civic principle. Violence against one Nigerian is violence against all.

The killing of Deborah Samuel, like violent episodes in every region, poses a question that Nigeria has postponed for too long. Will the nation allow silence, ambiguity, and selective outrage to dictate the terms of public life?

Breaking this cycle requires more than moral appeals. It requires structural reform, courageous leadership, and a public willing to confront its own complicities. Nigeria cannot build a stable future on foundations that shift with identity and sentiment. It cannot sustain a democracy in which the volume of outrage depends on the victim’s tribe, faith, or geography.

A country’s moral architecture is not built in moments of ease. It is shaped in moments when silence would be most convenient.

Nigeria’s future rests on choosing speech that is clear, consistent, and principled over the habits of evasion. Only then can the nation rebuild the moral foundations strong enough to hold its democracy, protect its citizens, and close the dangerous spaces between our voices.

Rear Admiral Ati-John (rtd) writes from Lagos.