On the evening of March 16, 2026, as families in Maiduguri prepared to eat their evening meal, a series of coordinated suicide bombings ripped through the city. The attacks struck the Monday Market axis, the post office corridor, the entrance to the University of Maiduguri Teaching Hospital, and the Kaleri area, leaving at least 23 people dead and 108 others injured. But these were not nameless statistics. They were traders closing for the day, students making their way home, patients and visitors gathered near a hospital gate, and ordinary residents trying to navigate an already strained city. Yet as so often happens, their humanity was swiftly compressed into a chilling headline: “at least 23 killed, over 100 injured.”

In the hours that followed, images of mangled bodies, shattered stalls, and grieving families filled television screens and social media feeds. The official response was equally familiar: statements of condemnation, routine briefings, and then a swift return to business as usual. President Bola Tinubu's team, preparing for a high-profile state visit to the United Kingdom, described as Nigeria's first in 37 years, pressed on with the itinerary. Diplomacy matters, and no serious argument denies that. But symbolism matters too. When a major terrorist attack does not interrupt the choreography of elite power, citizens feel overlooked and undervalued, sending a painful message about what, and who, truly counts.

That message becomes even more unsettling when viewed through the lens of geography and class. Maiduguri is not just another city; it is the epicentre of a long insurgency and a frontline community that has endured repeated waves of violence for years. The victims of the recent nasty attacks were not captains of industry, political heavyweights, or members of Nigeria’s protected elite. They were mostly ordinary people in the North-East, far from the country’s principal centres of privilege and power.

That distance matters. It shapes how quickly outrage rises, how long attention lasts, and how forcefully the state is compelled to respond. The uncomfortable truth is that violence in places like Maiduguri is too often absorbed as routine national tragedy, whereas a comparable attack in Abuja, Lagos or Port Harcourt would likely provoke a deeper political shock and a more sustained national reckoning. That disparity is precisely why Nigeria must build a public ethic and a policy culture that treat every life as equal in worth, whether lost in the shadow of power or far from it regardless of ethnicity, religion or class.

People experiencing poverty in the North-East are treated as collateral in a war that has dragged on for too long, while the privileges of the political elite remain untouched. The state asks ordinary Nigerians to bear the burden of insecurity, but seldom asks the powerful to surrender even symbolic convenience in solidarity with them.

This hierarchy is reinforced by language. Victims in places like Maiduguri become “residents,” “casualties,” and “the injured.” Their names, livelihoods, and family stories disappear almost immediately. When tragedy strikes the elite or the well-connected, the narrative changes. The dead become full people again: professionals, parents, pillars of their community. In Maiduguri, individuality dissolves into arithmetic.

That is what made the attack more than an act of terror. It became a revelation of something deeper in Nigeria’s public culture: our growing tolerance for unequal grief. The greater scandal is not only that bombs could still explode in the symbolic centre of Nigeria’s counter-insurgency campaign. It is that the deaths of ordinary people now enter national consciousness as familiar numbers, briefly mourned, bureaucratically processed, and then absorbed into the noise of governance.

Maiduguri occupies an uneasy place in the Nigerian imagination. It is central because it has been the epicentre of Boko Haram’s insurgency and the theatre of the country’s military response. Yet it is also treated as peripheral, as though its suffering were a regional condition rather than a national emergency. The latest bombings shattered any fragile illusion that the city had fully emerged from the worst years of jihadist violence.

They also came amid warnings of renewed militant resilience in Borno and a humanitarian crisis that remains severe across the region. Reuters reported that the insurgency has displaced about 2 million people, while the Associated Press put the death toll from Boko Haram’s campaign at more than 40,000 since 2009. IOM’s October 2025 displacement round counted 2,333,190 internally displaced persons in north-east Nigeria, while the 2026 Humanitarian Needs and Response Plan estimated that 5.9 million people in Borno, Adamawa, and Yobe face severe to extreme needs.

These figures matter because they show scale, but they also obscure individual stories. Behind every casualty number lies a broken household, lost income, trauma that lingers, and a future suddenly altered. A child loses a parent. A mother waits outside an emergency ward. A family begins again under the weight of pain the country will scarcely remember. Highlighting these personal tragedies can inspire citizens and policymakers to prioritise human-centred responses to violence.

The federal government did not remain entirely inert. President Tinubu condemned the bombings, security chiefs were ordered to relocate to Maiduguri, and Operation Hadin Kai intensified patrols and surveillance after intelligence suggested the risk of further suicide attacks. Two days later, Nigerian troops backed by air support repelled a major insurgent assault on a military base in Mallam Fatori, showing that the threat was not isolated but part of a wider militant push.

Yet this is precisely why Maiduguri is more than a security story. It is a moral test for Nigeria's leadership. A government can condemn violence, deploy officials, and still leave intact the wider perception that ordinary Nigerians are expected to absorb extraordinary suffering without disrupting the rituals of power. Recognising this moral failure can motivate policymakers and citizens to demand more equitable and compassionate governance that values all lives equally.

In Maiduguri, repetition deepens the erasure. The city has suffered so much that its suffering now risks being treated as routine. Repetition breeds distance, and distance breeds moral fatigue. Fatigue is one of the gravest dangers any republic can face, because it teaches both state and society to accept what should remain intolerable. This moral fatigue must be challenged to prevent acceptance of ongoing injustice and violence.

This is why the problem is not only Boko Haram, ISWAP, or whichever faction carried out the latest bombings. It is also the political psychology that prolonged insecurity produces. When violence becomes chronic, leaders begin to manage it rather than end it. Citizens learn survival skills in places where they can expect protection. National attention drifts toward spectacle, elections, elite quarrels, and diplomatic theatre. In that atmosphere, grief itself becomes stratified. Some deaths shake the state. Others pass through it.

The true measure of how a state values human life is not in its condolences but in its preparedness. It lies in whether warnings are acted upon, whether intelligence systems work, whether hospitals can handle mass casualties, whether victims' families receive visible support, and whether leaders are willing to treat attacks on ordinary citizens as national disruptions rather than local inconveniences.

Recent reporting suggests that the warning signs were already there. In April 2025, Reuters reported concerns from Governor Babagana Zulum and other analysts that jihadist groups were regrouping, launching more coordinated attacks, and adapting their tactics. The March 2026 bombings did not emerge from nowhere. They exposed, once again, Nigeria's habit of reacting after violence has already broken out.

That reactive pattern is why official statements increasingly sound hollow. Nigerians know the script: condemn, reassure, deploy, investigate, restore calm. Some of these steps are necessary. None is sufficient on its own. A serious state would do more. It would build layered intelligence around vulnerable urban centres, improve civilian alert systems, strengthen trauma care and emergency logistics, publish credible after-action reviews, compensate victims transparently, and honour the dead not only with prayers but with policy. The point is not performance. It is equal citizenship.

The hardest question raised by Maiduguri is not whether Nigeria can eventually defeat insurgents militarily. It is whether the country still possesses a civic ethic strong enough to insist that the life of a trader in Maiduguri carries the same national worth as that of a banker in Ikoyi, a politician in Abuja, or an investor flown in for a summit. Democracies do not fail only when they lose territory. They also fail when they quietly create a hierarchy of whose suffering deserves interruption and whose suffering can be absorbed.

That is why Maiduguri should trouble the entire federation. Not because violence in the North-East is new, but because familiarity with it has become part of the national problem. A republic that grows used to mass death in one corner of its territory is teaching itself a dangerous lesson: that some Nigerians are more grievable than others.

The March 16 bombings were a terrorist crime. But they were also an indictment of a political order that too often responds to the deaths of ordinary people with language faster than transformation. Nigeria will not honour Maiduguri merely by condemning evil. It will honour Maiduguri when public policy, political symbolism, and national empathy begin to say the same thing: no Nigerian life is expendable, no grieving city is peripheral, and no government can claim legitimacy if it treats the deaths of its people as a recurring inconvenience rather than a foundational emergency.

•Dr Dakuku Peterside is the author of 2 new bestselling books, “Leading in a Storm” and “Beneath the Surface”.

Update news