Hate is a Nigerian marketplace (2)
In Nigeria’s present as in her past, faith is more torment than pleasure. Religious faith, to be precise. Time and again, it reasserts utility as the opium of the people.
In Nigeria’s present as in her past, faith is more torment than pleasure. Religious faith, to be precise. Time and again, it reasserts utility as the opium of the people.
Think of it as the goddess Fortuna gambling with living and dead men’s bones. Thus, the fervour of Pro-Iranian young men of Nigeria’s Shia Muslim sect, who recently gathered in tight circles, fists clenched, chanting curses against America and Israel for invading Iran.
Far away in the Southeast, another procession surged through the streets in identical uniforms, hoisting American and Israeli flags, in choreographed anger and solidarity with the United States and Israel amid the duo’s ill-thought-out assault on Iran.
These irate divides paraded with the fervour of faithful spoiling for a holy war. Yet, between these two spectacles loomed the unasked question of how a people so burdened by their own unfinished crises had found the emotional surplus to fight the wars of distant others.
It wasn’t just their passion that was unsettling, but also its direction. Like frantic merchandisers of hate and needless rage, their eyes were turned outward, fixed on distant lands whose histories they hadn’t lived and whose tragedies they encountered only through desperate propaganda. Yet their outrage was intimate, almost personal, as though the deserts of the Middle East had somehow crept into the Nigerian bloodstream. One could not watch without sensing that something creepier than politics and righteous rage was at work; something buried deep in mischief, waiting patiently for a cue.
That cue resonated again, closer to home, in Maiduguri. On Monday, March 16, while Muslim families gathered to take iftar, multiple bomb blasts erupted at the post office, market, and entrance to the University of Maiduguri Teaching Hospital. At least 23 people were killed, while 108 others were injured.
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The nation’s response to the suspected suicide bombings flitted between abject mockery and horror that had little to do with the victims lying in hospital wards. While the bereaved mourned, some hecklers reduced the tragedy to the base sentimentality of tribe and creed. The spectacle was as troubling as the violence itself: the deaths of fellow citizens became material for derision while their pain was refracted through the narrow prisms of identity.
Two days later, when troops of Operation Hadin Kai, in concert with the Nigerian Air Force, repelled an infiltration attempt in Malam Fatori, killing about ‘61 ISWAP terrorists,’ the response was notably quieter. The same voices that energetically mocked victims of Monday’s blast and the military could not muster equal enthusiasm for commendation. Heroism, it seemed, had become less compelling than grievance.
Taken together, these moments reveal both a crisis of empathy and a deeper distortion in the Nigerian psyche: a condition in which citizens are subtly rewired to respond more readily to narratives of division than to those of shared humanity.
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Religious bigotry permeates, more completely, the Nigerian psyche. Christianity and Islam, two traditions that have coexisted in uneasy proximity, are now too often presented as opposing armies locked in perpetual suspicion rather than parallel paths to meaning. Faith has been conscripted to nourish identity politics in an endless yet avoidable war.
This transformation didn’t happen overnight. It was cultivated, gradually, in the intimate spaces where children learn how to interpret the world. The Nigerian child encounters prejudice, first, as a story told in sermons, dramatised in movies, and intoned in family conversations. In these narratives, the universe is sharply divided. The heroes speak English with Western accents, their righteousness affirmed by cinematic triumphs, while the villains emerge from deserts and mosques, their intentions signalled by familiar tropes of menace.
Such portrayals instruct the child, often unconsciously, about how to assign blame and virtue. It teaches how to label and recognise an enemy before understanding a conflict. Over time, these lessons settle into instinct. By adulthood, they no longer feel like opinions but like truths that have always existed.
The consequence is a society that reacts to global events with less objectivity, driven by juvenile bias. When conflict arises involving forces like USA-Israel vs Iran, many Nigerians respond with frantic ignorance and emotional dishonesty scripted long before they misunderstood the stakes. They align themselves with Western actors flexing bandit powers, rarely pausing to ask whose interests are truly being served.
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Imperial actors, attentive to these vulnerabilities, have learned to exploit such mental slaves with precision. A terse, misleading statement, amplified through digital networks, can ignite passions that take days to extinguish. The false narrative surrounding the Wukari cathedral fire, for instance, demonstrated how easily misinformation can be weaponised to inflame religious tensions in Nigeria.
Such manipulation thrives where historical memory suffers severe erosion. Aside from extracting resources from Africa, colonialism also implanted psychological hierarchies that taught many Africans, Nigerians in particular, to distrust their own civilisations while romanticising the perceived righteous authority of foreign powers.
It introduced a dubious geography that situated the West as the centre of virtue, while casting other regions as perpetual peripheries of disorder. Within this inherited framework, it becomes easier for Nigerians to identify with Western powers, even when those powers pursue interests that have little to do with their well-being. It becomes easier, too, to view other non-Western societies through a lens of suspicion, their complexities flattened into caricatures that echo the stories absorbed in childhood.
Consequently, the ordinary citizen, animated by passions he believes to be his own, becomes an unwitting participant in a larger chessboard of influence. The loudest voices on social media, the most animated debaters in buses and marketplaces, form the visible edge of this phenomenon—a restless chorus that can be stirred to outrage with minimal effort.
What would it take for Nigerians to reclaim their mental sovereignty? The answer resides in the habits of thought that shape how individuals interpret the world, in the stories they inherit, and in the fears and desires that guide their loyalties.
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True change must begin where those habits are formed. The family, often overlooked in grand political analyses, remains the most powerful site of socialisation. It is within the home that children first learn how to name differences, respond to unfamiliar beliefs, and balance conviction with empathy. A family that teaches its wards to question prejudice equips them to resist the forces of division.
Education must also recover its deeper purpose. It can no longer be deployed as a transmitter of routine information, which often leaves underlying prejudices intact. Nigeria’s educational system must be repurposed to cultivate capacities for critical thought and the courage to hold multiple perspectives without drifting into hostility. Without this intellectual grounding, citizens will continue to mistake emotional hooliganism for truth.
Religious institutions, too, face a moment of reckoning. They possess immense influence over the character formation of their adherents, an influence that can either deepen division or foster understanding. Faith must no longer be founded as a fortress against perceived ‘hostile others’ but as a vehicle of humility and compassion. This choice must be made daily, in sermons, conversations, and in the subtle cues that shape belief.
This minute, Nigeria stands at a crossroads that is as much psychological as it is political. The conflicts that threaten its stability transcend those fought with weapons and include those sustained through perception.
It’s about time we distinguished between real Nigerian struggles and the staged dramas of distant powers.
