Hate is a Nigerian marketplace

Riley’s claim and resultant outrage melded with the narrative of ‘Christian genocide’ that has become the emotional patois of public life. Only later did Rev. Fr. John Laikei, Director of Communications for the Catholic Diocese of Wukari, explain that the fire had begun with an electrical spark shortly after choir rehearsal around 9.45 pm, and that the real tragedy was the absence of functional fire service vehicles in the area. There had been no terrorist attack on the church, no religious violence; only faulty wiring and a town too poorly equipped to fight a fire.

Yet, truth tarried, manifesting long after the lie had galloped across continents. The incident might have snowballed and faded into the long catalogue of Nigerian mishaps if it had not revealed something deeper than misinformation. It exposed the delicate nature of the Nigerian mind; how easily it can be mobilised by distant voices and how eagerly it joins dubious foreign crusades primed to exploit fissures in Nigerian society.

The Wukari fire became a theatre in which external actors discovered, once again, how simple it is to strike a match inside Nigeria’s emotional tinderbox.

For generations, imperial powers exploited a principle that many Nigerians still struggle to recognise: that the most efficient way to destroy a society is not through armies but through indoctrination. If a population can be taught to distrust itself, see its neighbours as enemies and its conflicts as cosmic battles between good and evil, it will dismantle its own house with little effort from external actors.

Sadly, Nigerians often cooperate enthusiastically in this process. A large number of citizens, animated by religious fervour and political frustration, now interpret global conflicts through lenses that were mischievously installed in their minds from childhood. They cheer for distant powers with the passion of devotees, unaware that their loyalties were cultivated long before they possessed the intellectual tools to question them.

 The psychological conditioning often begins early. Many Nigerian children first encounter their moral map of the world through stories told on church pulpits, in classrooms, and on the flickering screens of imported cinema. In these narratives, the characters rarely appear in neutral colours. The villains often bear Arab names, speak with Middle Eastern accents, or kneel on prayer mats beneath desert skies. The heroes, meanwhile, arrive wrapped in American flags or Western uniforms, bearing the promise of salvation through force.

By the time a Nigerian child reaches adolescence, an emotional script has already taken root. He may not know the history of Iran or Palestine, but he has absorbed an instinctive sense of who the villains are supposed to be. When the news cycle eventually presents a geopolitical conflict involving Muslims, Persians, or Arabs, the mind recognises the characters instantly, as though they have wandered out of a familiar film.

Religious spaces sometimes deepen this conditioning. Sermons intended to fortify faith can, when wielded carelessly, transform sacred texts into instruments of cultural warfare. Scriptures meant to nurture compassion become rhetorical weapons, and the spiritual imagination of minors becomes populated with caricatures of enemies they have never encountered in real life.

Children rarely possess the psychological armour to resist indoctrination. They absorb the prejudice the way dry soil absorbs rain, until the belief coalesces into instinct.

The novelist Doris Lessing once observed, with disarming honesty, that every educational system is a form of indoctrination, an arrangement of ideas designed to reproduce the worldview of the society that built it. What children receive in classrooms and pulpits, she argues in The Golden Notebook, is an amalgam of current prejudices and inherited assumptions, presented as if it were eternal truth. And only a minority will develop the intellectual independence required to interrogate such inheritance.

History, thus, proves that you are being taught by people who have been able to accommodate themselves to a regime of thought laid down by their predecessors─a self-perpetuating system.

 Many Nigerians never attain that stage of interrogation. Rather, they bear their childhood narratives into adulthood, where the stories continue to shape their interpretation of politics, religion, and international affairs. Thus, a church burnt by an electrical fault can instantly become proof of a religious conspiracy, while America and Israel’s criminal invasion of Iran is interpreted through a tarnished emotional reflex rather than a historical and just understanding.

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This same emotional reflex surfaced in the aftermath of the killing of Lieutenant Colonel Umar Farouk, a soldier who battled terrorists in Borno and reclaimed villages from them. His death attracted mockery from citizens who viewed the Army Commander through the prism of tribe, religion, and political resentment. Aside from a few who mourned him, many dismissed him as an agent of a government they disliked.

Behind that cruel reaction subsists a society shorn of moral character. Nigerians demand patriotism from soldiers while practicing very little of it themselves. They expect men at the frontlines to protect a nation that often refuses to defend the dignity of its own military.

 Soldiers’ testimonies from that battlefield are haunting in resonance. Out of about 200 men stationed at the military base in Kukawa, only 36 stayed to repel the terrorists. Four were beheaded in the confrontation. The rest fled, exhausted and poorly equipped. Shall we blame this on cowardice, inefficient leadership or battle fatigue?

 Their flight reflects failings of a system in which leadership, logistics, and moral clarity have gradually eroded. Soldiers fight with inadequate equipment, unreliable intelligence, and a bureaucracy that often treats their sacrifice as expendable.

The soldiers who fled are perfect reflections of the Nigerian families from which they emerged. They manifest the same anxieties, prejudices, and survival instincts as the institutions that raised them. They are products of the failed society that now condemns them.

 In that sense, the deserters and their hecklers mirror Nigeria itself. Civilisations decline not only through conquest but through the erosion of citizenship and moral character.

Yet renewal is possible.

To be continued...