The killing spree continues. Blood, death, and ashes now define our humanity. Our country has become an open cemetery; someplace where burial has overtaken birth, and mourning overshadows joy. Cries like those of Rachel of Ramah are so often heard because our children are no more. Our country groans under the weight of grief it must bear. 

On June 21, 2025, the earth swallowed more. Thirty-one wedding travellers, citizens of the Basawa community in Zaria, Kaduna State, set out on a journey of joy. It was meant to be a day of love and union in Pau, Plateau State. Instead, it ended in a massacre. These unarmed citizens, hopeful and full of celebration, were ambushed and slaughtered by a mob. Among the dead were the father, the brother, and the uncle of the groom. They carried no threat, only kola nuts and ceremonial gifts. 

Yet, in a land where trust has decayed into suspicion, even the innocent are mistaken for enemies. Their killers were not foreign. Not bandits. Not terrorists. Not herdsmen. Their killers were fellow citizens turned executioners. The mob, now an increasingly familiar feature of our country’s social landscape, has become the de facto authority in many areas, imposing sentences and summary executions. 

In a country where state authority is receding daily, the vacuum is being filled by vengeance. On the same day as the Basawa convoy massacre, another horror unfolded in Bokkos and Mangu Local Government Areas of Plateau State, where suspected herdsmen launched coordinated attacks on villages. In Juwan, Tangur District, they crept in under the cover of night, breaking into homes through ceilings, unleashing bullets, and setting fire to dwellings. Ten people, mostly children and the elderly, were killed. More were wounded. Laughter and dreams were extinguished in their sleep. 

Across the highlands of Plateau and descending into the fertile valley of Benue, violence moved like the flowing bloodstained waters of the River Benue. In Wannune, a quiet community in Tarka Local Government Area, the hometown of the Secretary to the Government of the Federation, Senator George Akume, the shadow of death fell heavily on the land. It came only hours after the ceremonial display of grief by officialdom: a presidential parade draped in jejune solemnity, choreographed with the theatrics of state mourning. While condolences were being woven with hollow sorrow, bullets were already writing themselves as graffiti on the walls of homes in Wannune. In that haunting moment, the performance of sympathy collided with the reality of neglect. The message was clear: death does not wait for dignity, and sorrow cannot be managed by protocol, while violence begets violence.

What explains this descent into the Hobbesian state? Fear. Anger. Retaliation. A vicious cycle.

Every act of violence begets another. Herdsmen attack a village. Inhabitants retaliate. Vigilantes build defence walls. They set up lookout posts. A wedding convoy is mistaken for an invading force and is annihilated. Another community retaliates. Another night brings new killings. It is a cycle of blood and fire, a ritual of death performed in endless repetition.

Today, there is no true homeland for our citizens, only homesteads of grief. Every community keeps its own list of the dead. Every local vigilante tells the story of betrayal, of family members murdered and homes torched. In such a fraught atmosphere, the line between fear and hatred blurs. Justice is not only elusive, it is buried.

The mob that struck down the wedding party would justify their act as self-defence. They would claim they were protecting their homeland. They would argue that they had been let down too many times by the state that no longer shields its citizens from terror. But what they meted out was not justice, it was murder. Barbaric, senseless, and damning. 

Yet, the painful truth is this: even the murderers are often the previously aggrieved. They, too, have buried sons. They, too, have watched crops burn, seen mothers slaughtered, and cried out for help that never came. In the absence of justice, they became what they once feared: the very fire that consumed their homes. Thus, the cycle of bloodletting continues; each act nourishing the next in a perpetual orgy of mutual destruction. 

It becomes all too easy to make sense of it, and even easier to discern a haunting symmetry in our collective grief: a grim arithmetic of sorrow, tears, and blood, meticulously tallied by invisible hands. As though grief itself is being rationed with mathematical precision, each community is allotted its quota of mourning, each family its fair share of tears. 

It is as if the killers among our citizens are issuing a chilling war dispatch: the more anguish we endure, the more we shall inflict pain for pain, injury for injury, death for death, until we are all equally yoked by grief. This tit-for-tat of tragedy, this exchange by barter of blood, gives tragic resonance to Carl Sandburg’s haunting lines in his poem, “The Right to Grief”: “Very well, you for your grief and I for mine”. In this bleak marketplace of vengeance and reprisal, everyone claims their right to mourn by making others mourn as well. Sorrow becomes a currency, and death is a cruel exchange. 

The killing spree can’t continue. 

This is the tragedy of our country in 2025. A country turning on itself. Citizens are tearing each other apart, like a serpent devouring its own tail. In this fratricidal rage, there are no victors, only mourners. But this isn’t new. Our country has been here before. During the 1990s, General Paul Okutimo,  the undertaker of the Ogoni people, infamously boasted of knowing 201 ways to kill. And kill he did. The Ogoni paid the price for demanding a clean environment and justice. 

The oil-soaked fields of Ogoniland were once stained with blood, not just crude. That legacy of cruelty endures, not in the barrel of the state’s gun anymore, but in the hands of machete-wielding youths, in herdsmen armed with AK-47s, in mobs radicalised by grief and rage, who have perfected the art of killing, and who have acquired the franchise of violence. 

Murder has become routine. Citizens are no longer safe in churches, mosques, markets, weddings, or even in their own homes. The home, once a sanctuary, is now a slaughter slab. Children grow up learning to run for dear life before they can read. Women give birth on the run, hiding in the bush. Men who once dug wells now dig graves. This is more than a security crisis. It is a sign of state failure. A moral collapse. A haemorrhage of our collective soul.

What is most galling is the official response: silence, deflection, platitudes. The government issues condolence messages. Promises are made. Committees are formed. Statements are read. But nothing changes. No perpetrators are punished. The cycle is not broken. Instead, it deepens. All the while, the government blames “unknown gunmen.”

Impunity, which reigns freely here, has become currency. Murder is cheaper than bread. Killing is easier than living. And so the violence spreads. Mangu bleeds. Bokkos weeps. Zaria mourns. Eha-Amufu is on the edges of grief. Yelawata grieves. Each geopolitical region of our country now lives with its own ghosts. Each community waits for the next attack. Each day begins with dread. Each night ends in fire. The killing field is now more than a crime scene. It is a war front. Not like John McCrae’s Flanders Field of poppies and of torches held high. But a silent war in which our citizens become the war-dead. A war of all against all.

When a country fails to protect itself, citizens build their own protective walls. When justice fails, citizens arm themselves. When hope dies, rage replaces it. And rage, as history teaches us, is a poor sculptor. It shapes only monsters. The killing of the Basawa convoy was not random. It was symptomatic. It reflects a deeper illness. A collective post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). A systemic unravelling. It mirrors what Juwan endured. What Gwoza has seen. What Zamfara knows all too well. No one kills their way to safety. Vengeance heals nothing. It deepens the wounds. It ensures that tomorrow’s dead are already walking among us.

If our country and its citizens continue down this road, the future will be devoured sooner rather than later. No country survives on bloodletting. No republic stands on the bones of citizens. No democracy flowers in the soil of mass graves. Our country must choose a different path. The government must act decisively. Not with empty gestures. Not with photo ops or state visits. But with genuine leadership.

Security must be localised and intelligence-driven. Communities must be protected. Dialogue must be facilitated between communities at war with each other. Trust must be rebuilt. Truth must be told. Beyond security, justice must form the precursor to reconciliation. The killers must be fished out and punished. The dead must not be forgotten. Their names must be etched into our country’s memory, not washed away by the next atrocity. Forgetting makes us become the killers, the mobs, the herdsmen, the terrorists and the butchers. This moment must become a turning point. The plateau must breathe again. Zaria must bury its dead without bracing for the next round of mourning. Juwan must rebuild with hope, not fear.

Life’s choices are foregrounded by peace. Our country and our citizens must choose peace. For the path they both now tread leads only to extinction. And when the last child cries, when the last widow wails, when the final village burns, who will remain to bear witness, and who will our country hold accountable?

Abdul Mahmud is a human rights attorney in Abuja