They Were Killed on Palm Sunday. The President Was Celebrating His Birthday

On the evening of Sunday, March 29, 2026, gunmen, reportedly numbering over twenty, some allegedly dressed in security-style uniforms stormed the Angwan Rukuba community in Jos North, Plateau State. They arrived on motorcycles and opened fire indiscriminately on residents at a popular local spot. What was supposed to be a quiet Sunday evening turned into a scene of carnage.

Source: International Christian Concern 

It was Palm Sunday. The first day of Holy Week.

The death toll has now climbed to twenty-five confirmed fatalities. Police initially confirmed fourteen. Community sources say the number may be even higher. There is a video circulating. A mother is holding her dead son. I watched it. The tears that came were not the soft kind. They were hot and they were angry and they felt like shame - shame that this is the country we are living and dying in.

I am from Lagos. I tell myself Lagos is different. I tell myself the bandits are far. But they are not far. They are one tragedy, one ignored warning, one absent military checkpoint away. And I am supposed to find comfort in geography while my country buries its children.

This Is Not New. That Is The Problem.

If you are reading this and you are surprised, that is okay. Nigeria has a way of burying its horror in the news cycle, renaming it "herder-farmer crisis," packaging it in political language, and moving on before the graves are even filled.

But let me give you context. Not to numb you. To make sure you understand the full weight of what is happening.

Plateau State recorded more than 420 attacks between 2021 and 2024. Those attacks resulted in more than 3,000 deaths and displaced tens of thousands of residents. That is not a conflict. That is a slow extermination that the Nigerian state has watched, condemned in press releases, and done virtually nothing to stop.

In the two years since President Bola Tinubu's government assumed power, Amnesty International verified the killing of over 10,000 people in attacks by armed groups across Benue, Edo, Katsina, Kebbi, Plateau, Sokoto and Zamfara states. Plateau state alone accounts for 2,630 of those deaths. Two thousand, six hundred and thirty people. In two years. Under one president. Who was celebrating his birthday while the bodies from this latest attack were still warm.

In the past two years, 167 rural communities were attacked across Bassa, Barkin Ladi, Bokkos, Jos East, Jos South, Mangu, Riyom, and Wase local government areas. As a result, 65,000 people have been internally displaced and some communities have been displaced more than once, because the IDP camps were also attacked.

Read that again. They ran. And the attackers followed them there too.

Survivors frequently report delayed or absent security responses, even when attacks occur near military installations or checkpoints. There is a military drone base in Kwall, Bassa LGA. Men were ambushed a quarter of a mile from it. No security personnel arrived after the incident. The drone saw nothing. The soldiers heard nothing. Or perhaps they did, and did nothing anyway. At this point, both possibilities are equally damning.

They Have A Pattern. The Government Has A Script.

Here is how it always goes. There is an attack. Dozens, sometimes hundreds are killed. The governor condemns it. The president releases a statement. The military is deployed "to restore calm." A curfew is imposed. Community leaders demand justice. Nobody is arrested. The curfew is lifted. The soldiers leave. And then it happens again.

Source: Facebook

After the March 29 attack, the state government imposed a 48-hour curfew on Jos North local government area. The University of Jos suspended all examinations scheduled for Monday and Tuesday due to the proximity of the campus to the affected neighborhoods. Angry youth blocked major roads and engaged in retaliatory skirmishes.

People are not blocking roads because they are lawless. They are blocking roads because that is all they have left. When the state abandons you, when your cries go unanswered season after season, year after year, you block the road. You make noise with your body because your words have not worked.

Last Easter, at least 43 people were killed in Bassa LGA. In June 2025, Christian communities in Guma LGA in Benue state faced at least six attacks between June 8 and 14 that left more than 218 dead and thousands displaced. Easter. Christmas. Palm Sunday. The holy days have become open hunting seasons. The pattern is documented. It is not a coincidence. And the government knows.

What has the government done? Tinubu visited Benue in June 2024, met with traditional rulers, shook hands, took photographs. The Tiv leader told him plainly that what was happening was a "calculated, well-planned, full-scale genocidal invasion." Tinubu nodded. He left. The killings continued.

What It Means To Watch This From Lagos

I am angry. I want to be honest about that, because I think the performance of calm in Nigerian public discourse has become its own form of complicity. We have been trained to be measured. To be "objective." To present "both sides." To not say the things we actually feel because it might seem too raw, too emotional, too partisan.

I am done with that.

I am a young Nigerian woman sitting in Lagos watching a video of a mother holding her dead son, and I am furious. Not at the faceless gunmen alone, though yes, them too. I am furious at a president who was publicly wishing himself a happy birthday while that video was circulating. I am furious at a government that has had three years to fix this and has produced nothing but speeches. I am furious at myself for the number of times I have felt helpless and scrolled past these stories because the weight of them was too much.

Source: Punch Newspaper

I give up trying to be better in a country where being better gets you nowhere. Better than what? So I can be more educated, more professional, more hardworking, and still be one motorcycle attack away from becoming a statistic that the government condemns in a press release?

The people in Jos were not doing anything extraordinary that Sunday night. They were living. Just living. And that was enough to get them killed.

God Is Not The Problem. Governance Is.

I say this as someone who believes in God, and who has had very honest, very difficult words with God this week. I do not understand why the people who fill churches and pray and raise their children to do right are the ones being slaughtered on their holiest days. I do not have a clean theological answer for that. And I am tired of people who do, people who have never buried a child, never watched a video like that, never felt their hands shake with the kind of grief that has nowhere to go, offering five-minute sermons about divine timing.

But God is not the one we elected. God did not campaign on security and infrastructure and a better Nigeria. God did not swear an oath to protect Nigerian lives. Our leaders did. And they are failing. Catastrophically. Repeatedly. Without consequence.

Amnesty International's Director for Nigeria, Isa Sanusi, said it plainly: in the two years since Tinubu assumed office with a promise to enhance security, things have only gotten worse, as authorities continue to fail to protect the rights to life, physical integrity, liberty, and the security of tens of thousands of people across the country.

That is not an opposition talking point. That is a human rights organization that has done the fieldwork, counted the bodies, and written the reports - reports that sit in offices in Abuja while the killing continues.

The Numbers We Are Not Supposed To Say Out Loud

Nigeria was placed on the United States State Department's list of Countries of Particular Concern for religious freedom, with the designation citing the ongoing massacres of Christians by jihadist terrorists. The Nigerian government bristled at this. Called it interference. But what do you call it when your own citizens cannot go to church without being killed?

In December 2025 alone, armed groups killed at least 23 people in attacks on villages in Barkin Ladi and Jos South areas of Plateau state. That was three months ago. The bodies had barely been buried before March 29 happened.

Source: Facebook

Rights groups say the causes of conflict in Plateau are often complicated - land disputes, climate change stressing grazing routes, political and economic tensions, the influx of extremist ideology. But researchers agree on one thing: weak policing all but guarantees reprisal attacks. (Persecution.org) We know what the problem is. We have known for years. The knowledge is not the issue. The will to act is.

What We Owe The Dead

The woman in that video does not need our sympathy posts. She does not need a trending hashtag that disappears by Wednesday. She needs a government that would have prevented her son's death. She needed security forces that would have shown up. She needed a president who, on the day her son was killed, was thinking about birthday celebrations instead of governance. 

We cannot give her that now. It is too late for her son, and for the twenty-four others confirmed dead, and for the unknown number still being counted.

But it is not too late to refuse to normalize this. It is not too late to be angry - loudly, publicly, persistently angry. It is not too late to vote, to organize, to demand accountability at every level of government. It is not too late to say, clearly, without diplomatic softening: the Nigerian state is failing its people. This is not a natural disaster. This is a governance catastrophe.

In Plateau state, fields have been torched. Churches have been reduced to rubble. Families have been separated. Entire villages have been emptied. And the people responsible for stopping this are attending birthdays and giving press conferences.

Enough is enough is not just something you say when you are emotional. It is a statement of political reality. A country cannot continue to bleed like this and call itself a functioning state. A government cannot continue to fail like this and call itself legitimate.

The dead deserved better. The living deserve better.

We all do.