CHUKWUKADIBIA EMMANUEL ⭐️ @izzkadz - Twitter Profile

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about 13 hours ago

There's a pattern we don't like to admit out loud: something terrible happens in Nigeria, timelines light up for 48-72 hours, a hashtag trends, a few statements are issued, and then... nothing. Life resumes. The next news cycle takes over. And somewhere, a family is left holding grief that the rest of the country has already forgotten. Kidnapped schoolchildren. The Asaba "Waybill" guy killed by police. A young man handcuffed on the ground and run over by a police vehicle. The killings in Benue. The massacre in Yelwata. The Mokwa flood that wiped out entire families. Stampede tragedies that took innocent lives before anyone could even process the last one. Each of these was, on its own, enough to shake a nation. Together, they paint a much harder picture, not of isolated tragedies, but of a system that has trained its citizens to grieve quickly and move on quicker, because there's always another crisis waiting. Why do we move on so fast? Part of it is survival. When tragedy is this frequent, sitting with each one fully would be paralyzing. Nigerians have had to build a kind of emotional armor just to keep functioning, go to work, run businesses, raise children, in a country where the news cycle rarely lets a wound close before the next one opens. But there's a darker side to this pattern too. The speed at which we move on isn't just about resilience, it's also what allows accountability to disappear. No sustained pressure means no sustained investigation. No sustained investigation means no justice. And no justice means the next incident happens exactly the same way, because nothing was ever fixed. The cost of collective amnesia When outrage has an expiration date, those responsible, whether it's negligent security forces, unaccountable institutions, or systemic failures, learn that they only need to wait out the news cycle. A week of trending hashtags is a small price to pay for silence afterward. Meanwhile, the families left behind don't get to move on. They live with what happened long after the rest of the country has changed the subject. Every "Justice for..." that fades into silence is also a message to the next grieving family: your pain will trend, and then it will be forgotten too. "E no concern me", until it does There's a saying that captures the mentality perfectly: e no concern me. It's the quiet detachment that lets us scroll past tragedy that isn't ours. But that detachment has a short shelf life. The people affected by these tragedies weren't strangers to themselves, they were someone's brother, someone's classmate, someone's neighbor. Tragedy in Nigeria doesn't stay contained to headlines; it eventually touches everyone, directly or through someone close to you. What breaking the cycle actually requires This isn't a call to stay in perpetual outrage that's not sustainable either. It's a call to build the muscle of follow-through: asking what happened after the hashtag stopped trending. Did the officer get charged? Did the community get support? Did anything change so this doesn't happen again in six months? Until we start asking those questions consistently, we'll keep repeating this exact cycle, tragedy, outrage, silence, repeat, and the headline that "carries a name you know" will eventually arrive, exactly like the original post warned.

izzkadz's tweet photo. There's a pattern we don't like to admit out loud: something terrible happens in Nigeria, timelines light up for 48-72 hours, a hashtag trends, a few statements are issued, and then... nothing. Life resumes. The next news cycle takes over. And somewhere, a family is left holding grief that the rest of the country has already forgotten.

Kidnapped schoolchildren. The Asaba "Waybill" guy killed by police. A young man handcuffed on the ground and run over by a police vehicle. The killings in Benue. The massacre in Yelwata. The Mokwa flood that wiped out entire families. Stampede tragedies that took innocent lives before anyone could even process the last one.
Each of these was, on its own, enough to shake a nation. Together, they paint a much harder picture, not of isolated tragedies, but of a system that has trained its citizens to grieve quickly and move on quicker, because there's always another crisis waiting.

Why do we move on so fast?
Part of it is survival. When tragedy is this frequent, sitting with each one fully would be paralyzing. Nigerians have had to build a kind of emotional armor just to keep functioning, go to work, run businesses, raise children, in a country where the news cycle rarely lets a wound close before the next one opens.

But there's a darker side to this pattern too. The speed at which we move on isn't just about resilience, it's also what allows accountability to disappear. No sustained pressure means no sustained investigation. No sustained investigation means no justice. And no justice means the next incident happens exactly the same way, because nothing was ever fixed.

The cost of collective amnesia
When outrage has an expiration date, those responsible, whether it's negligent security forces, unaccountable institutions, or systemic failures, learn that they only need to wait out the news cycle. A week of trending hashtags is a small price to pay for silence afterward.

Meanwhile, the families left behind don't get to move on. They live with what happened long after the rest of the country has changed the subject. Every "Justice for..." that fades into silence is also a message to the next grieving family: your pain will trend, and then it will be forgotten too.

"E no concern me", until it does

There's a saying that captures the mentality perfectly: e no concern me. It's the quiet detachment that lets us scroll past tragedy that isn't ours. But that detachment has a short shelf life. The people affected by these tragedies weren't strangers to themselves, they were someone's brother, someone's classmate, someone's neighbor. Tragedy in Nigeria doesn't stay contained to headlines; it eventually touches everyone, directly or through someone close to you.
What breaking the cycle actually requires
This isn't a call to stay in perpetual outrage that's not sustainable either. It's a call to build the muscle of follow-through: asking what happened after the hashtag stopped trending. Did the officer get charged? Did the community get support? Did anything change so this doesn't happen again in six months?

Until we start asking those questions consistently, we'll keep repeating this exact cycle, tragedy, outrage, silence, repeat, and the headline that "carries a name you know" will eventually arrive, exactly like the original post warned.

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CHUKWUKADIBIA EMMANUEL ⭐️

@izzkadz

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