I woke up this morning and the first thing that hit my timeline was Jos. Again. Angwan Rukuba. Palm Sunday night. Gunmen on motorcycles rode into Gari Ya Waye community at exactly 7:50pm and started shooting at people who were just outside. Just existing. Not doing anything special. Just being alive in their neighbourhood on a Sunday evening.

By the time Nigerian Army personnel arrived at 8:45pm, the damage was already done. That is 55 minutes. Almost one full hour. And in that one hour, families were shattered. The University of Jos suspended exams today. A 48 hour curfew was imposed across Jos North. Governor Mutfwang visited, called it barbaric and unprovoked, and promised justice.

I have heard that promise so many times now it has started to sound like background noise.

Africanews put the death toll at 33. Other sources say at least 20. Archbishop Matthew Ishaya Audu of the Jos Catholic Archdiocese urged caution with numbers, saying details were still unclear because the curfew was making it hard to verify anything. But even the lowest confirmed number is too many. Even one would be too many.

And Then There Is the Other War

Because Jos is not the only thing weighing on Nigerians right now. There is another kind of violence that does not make international headlines. It happens slowly, every morning, at every market stall and every bus stop in this country.

It is the violence of prices.

Think about that fuel number for a second. In January of this year, fuel was around N875 to N900 per litre. By the time March arrived, it had jumped to N1,330. That did not happen in isolation. That jump went straight into transport fares. Which went straight into the price of everything carried by a truck, a keke, or a bus. Which went straight into your market basket.

There is a woman called Annabel documented by Nigeria Health Watch. She sells akara. She makes about N1,000 profit a day. Most of that goes to repaying food bought on credit the day before. She is pregnant. She has three children. When they asked her about eating well she said, "I am only thinking of the money to buy any food that we can cook and eat."

That sentence is the whole Nigerian economy in 19 words.

Where Are the Politicians in All of This?

I want to be fair. Not every politician is doing nothing. Some governors are genuinely trying. Some senators have made noise about the right things. I do not want to paint everyone with the same brush because that is lazy and it is also not true.

But here is what is also true.

We are in March 2026. The 2027 election is still more than a year away. And the campaign machinery of this country has been running at full speed since before the ink dried on the 2023 results. Defections. Declarations. Endorsements. Billboards going up in states where the governor has not fixed a single kilometre of road in three years. The business of politics never stops in Nigeria. It just changes its costume.

And the cruellest part? The attacks in Plateau State are not new. On March 14 alone, gunmen suspected to be bandits killed 20 people and rustled cattle from a village in Jos, ambushing soldiers on a routine patrol and killing 12 security personnel and eight community vigilantes in the process. That was less than three weeks before Palm Sunday night. The same state. The same kind of attack. The same kind of response. And then Sunday happened again.

But I Still Believe Something

I know how exhausting it is to keep caring. I know how easy it is to scroll past the Jos headlines because your own rent is due and your own fuel costs are eating you alive and you simply do not have the emotional room for more grief.

I feel that too. Most honest Nigerians do.

But here is what I keep coming back to. About 34.7 million Nigerians, including over 650,000 internally displaced persons across 27 states, are projected to face worse levels of food insecurity between June and August 2026. Those are not distant strangers. Those are people in Borno who cannot farm because of insecurity. People in Plateau who cannot go back to their land. People in Nasarawa whose harvest was stolen by bandits. The daily struggle and the political ambition are not two separate stories. They are the same story. One exists because the other is allowed to.

The people in Angwan Rukuba needed security last night and got it 55 minutes too late. Annabel needs her akara profit to actually be enough to feed her children without going into debt. The student at University of Jos needed to write an exam today and is instead sitting indoors waiting for a curfew to lift.

These are the real headlines of 2026 Nigeria. Not the defections. Not the declarations. Not the campaign songs and the endless endorsements.

And if we let the politicians convince us that 2027 is the main event while all of this is just background noise, then honestly, we deserve the government we keep getting.