In the early hours of Palm Sunday, March 29, 2026, gunmen descended on Angwan Rukuba in Jos North, Plateau State, turning a quiet evening into a slaughterhouse. At least 26 to 30 innocent Nigerian were gunned down in cold blood and President Bola Tinubu issued the usual condemnation, calling the killers “heartless cowards.” Words. More empty words from a government that has perfected the art of mourning without action.
This is not an isolated tragedy. Plateau State has bled for years under the same cycle: attack, outrage, promises, then silence until the next massacre. Yet under the Tinubu administration, the bloodletting has become routine. Nigerians have grown disturbingly comfortable with headlines screaming “X killed in Jos,” “Y slaughtered in Benue,” “Z massacred in Kaduna.” We read them, we shake our heads, we scroll past. The government counts on that numbness. It has turned mass death into background noise while it busies itself with the real business of power 2027.
Instead of mobilising the full weight of the Nigerian state to crush the bandits, herders, and terrorists turning the Middle Belt into a killing field, President Tinubu and his APC machinery are laser-focused on one thing: poaching governors and heavyweights from opposition parties to fortify his re-election bid. PDP governors are reportedly queuing up to defect, lured by the promise of federal protection and resources.
The message is clear: forget the dead in Jos; help us lock down 2027. Political survival trumps human lives. Is this how leadership is supposed to work in a country of over 200 million people?
Let us be brutally honest. When a government cannot protect its citizens from marauders armed with sophisticated weapons, it has failed at the most basic duty of statehood.
Security is not a campaign slogan. It is not something you promise during elections and abandon the moment you enter Aso Rock. Yet that is exactly what we have witnessed. Billions budgeted for security, yet the same old excuses: “unknown gunmen,”
“investigations ongoing,” “we will bring them to justice.” Justice for whom? The families burying their loved ones while the perpetrators roam free?
The incompetence runs deeper. This same government that cannot secure Jos or stop the daily abductions across the North is aggressively pushing digital taxation. You must file your taxes online, pay your levies through portals, and comply with every e-government directive. But when it comes to the most fundamental democratic right voting, you are told it is impossible to introduce online or electronic voting. Nigerians cannot be trusted with digital ballots, yet we are forced to trust the same broken system with our hard-earned money.
The hypocrisy is nauseating. A government quick to digitise revenue collection but terrified of digitising the vote is a government that fears accountability more than it fears terrorists.
We have normalised the unacceptable. Every fresh killing in Jos, every fresh cycle of revenge attacks, every fresh curfew is met with the same tired ritual: presidential condolence message, governor’s press conference, and then… nothing. No sustained military operation. No new security architecture. No accountability for security chiefs who keep failing. Just another day in Nigeria, where human life has become the cheapest commodity.
President Tinubu must be told plainly: chasing defectors for 2027 will not stop the bullets in Plateau. Recruiting opposition governors will not bring back the dead. Nigerians are watching. We are tired of being treated as mere statistics in your political chess game. The blood of Jos is on the hands of a leadership that has chosen power consolidation over people protection.
The United States has provided counter-terrorism support to Nigeria for years, training, intelligence sharing, equipment (including Super Tucano aircraft), and occasional targeted strikes against groups like Boko Haram and ISWAP in the northeast. However, as the added point rightly notes, America’s broader terrorism intervention in the context of the Middle Belt crisis has yet to produce a convincing scorecard of decisive, lasting impact particularly until the alleged sponsors of this violence, along with their foot soldiers and enablers (“messengers”), are effectively neutralized and dismantled.
We urge the USA to swing into more concrete and decisive action through enhanced intelligence support, targeted sanctions on identified financiers and sponsors, capacity-building for Nigerian forces, and whatever calibrated assistance is feasible before the blood of innocent souls spills even more widely across the nation, destabilizing the region further.
That said, sustainable solutions must ultimately be Nigerian-led. External help can enable but cannot substitute for domestic political will: breaking cycles of impunity, reforming security operations, addressing root causes like resource conflicts, climate pressures, weak rural governance, and prosecuting perpetrators regardless of ethnicity or affiliation. Foreign military intervention raises serious sovereignty, diplomatic, and practical challenges, and past experiences show mixed results without strong local ownership.
Enough is enough. The cycle must break. Or the Nigerian people will break it themselves at the ballot box, whenever this government finally allows them a fair chance to do so.