Nigeria today feels like a nation in a permanent state of siege. The statistics, the headlines, and the government’s glossy brochures cannot mask the grim truth that ordinary Nigerians already live with daily, insecurity is not abating, it is evolving, multiplying, and spreading into every corner of the country.
President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s administration boasts about killing “over 13,500 terrorists,” commissioning apps, and patching highways. Yet, beneath the noise of those proclamations, communities across Benue, Plateau, Kebbi, Borno, Katsina, and, closer home for me, the South-East, despite the recent capture of a notorius gang terrorising Imo, is drowning in a tide of violence. The government admits that “more needs to be done,” but what Nigerians see is not just the need for more; it is the evidence of repeated failure.
The South-East’s Own War Zone
For those of us in the South-East, insecurity is no longer an abstract story told from the North. It is lived reality. Communities in Imo, Anambra, Enugu, Ebonyi, and Abia are under siege from kidnappers, armed gangs, and trigger-happy security operatives. The roads from Owerri to Orlu, from Enugu to Nsukka, from Aba to Port Harcourt, have become corridors of fear. Daily, families live in dread of abduction, ransom demands, and the random brutality of extortionist checkpoints manned by soldiers and police.
The federal forces stationed in the region act less like protectors and more like conquerors, running roadblocks as tollgates, reducing towns and villages to garrison zones. This dual assault, from nonstate actors and state agents alike, has left the South-East traumatized and bleeding.
Violence Without Borders
It would be comforting to imagine that the South-East’s plight is unique. Sadly, it is not. Across Nigeria, the insecurity map has no blank spaces. The North-East is still stalked by Boko Haram and ISWAP. The North-West is plagued by bandits who now operate like warlords, running parallel governments. The North-Central remains a theater of farmer-herder massacres, often so devastating that entire communities vanish overnight. The South-South continues to simmer with cult violence, piracy, and oil theft. And even the once relatively “safe” South-West is not spared, as kidnappers and criminal gangs spread into the forests of Oyo, Ogun, and Ekiti.
This is not just criminality. It is systemic breakdown. From mass abductions of school children in Kaduna and Zamfara to the killing of traditional rulers in Imo and Ekiti, the message is clear: no one, no institution, no region is safe.
Why Nigeria Cannot Win Like This
The question is no longer why insecurity persists, but why the state seems incapable of confronting it. The answers are obvious to those of us who watch closely:
A compromised security architecture, riddled with corruption, ill-equipped, and demoralized.
A leadership that reacts only after massacres, offering the same empty vows to “hunt down perpetrators,” then moving on until the next tragedy.
A political class that views insecurity as a bargaining chip, deploying it selectively for advantage or using it as a smokescreen for their own failures.
An economy of violence, where poverty, unemployment, and hunger supply a steady stream of recruits for bandits, insurgents, and militias.
Above all, Nigeria is paying the price for refusing to admit uncomfortable truths.
Boko Haram and its offshoots are not just “criminals”, they are ideologically driven jihadists.
The herder-farmer clashes are not just about “grazing”, they are a brutal struggle for land, identity, and survival.
The South-East crisis is not simply “IPOB and ESN trouble”, it is also the bitter fruit of decades of marginalization, militarization, and exclusion.
A Nation at Breaking Point
Every Nigerian knows the script by heart. A massacre happens. Leaders condemn it. Security chiefs promise to act. A few arrests are paraded. Life limps on until the next tragedy. This macabre cycle has turned bloodshed into background noise, and the normalization of violence into official policy.
For me, what is most frightening is that Nigeria is losing more than lives. We are losing faith, faith in government, faith in the army and police, faith in the very idea that this nation can guarantee safety and dignity to its citizens. A country where people no longer believe that peace is possible is a country on the edge of collapse.
President Tinubu’s government faces a defining test. Military deployments and chest-thumping alone cannot solve this. What Nigeria needs is a complete rethinking of security, from equipping and reforming the armed forces, to dismantling extortionist checkpoints, to addressing the root causes of violence: injustice, poverty, exclusion, and impunity. Anything less is merely managing bloodshed, not stopping it.
Until then, Nigerians, from Benue to Zamfara, from Imo to Lagos, will continue to live with the nightmare of insecurity as the soundtrack of their daily lives.
By Chimazuru Oblong Nnadi-Oforgu
OBLONG MEDIA UNLIMITED 
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