By Ebuka Ukoh
Blurb:
As Americans pause this Memorial Day to honour those who died in service to their country, Nigerians, too, must reflect on the kind of nation we are shaping for the living.
Monday, May 25, is Memorial Day in the United States. It is intended to serve as a solemn reminder that freedom, stability, and national order often come at the cost of human sacrifice.
Flags rise. Cemeteries fill. Families remember loved ones who never returned home. The day forces a nation to pause and reflect on the meaning of duty, citizenship, and collective responsibility. At its core, Memorial Day reflects an unwritten agreement between citizen and state …that human sacrifice must never be treated cheaply and that those who serve or suffer for a nation must not be forgotten casually.
But as I reflect on Memorial Day from a Nigerian perspective, my thoughts drift painfully to another question: What happens to a country when its people begin to feel abandoned?
Remembrance means little if societies stop protecting the living.
Over the past few years, Nigerians have watched tragedy after tragedy unfold across the country. Farmers are slain on their land. Pupils were abducted from classrooms. Worshippers were attacked in churches and mosques. Whole communities were displaced. Teachers were killed. Citizens are detained under questionable circumstances. Hospitals turned into theatres of fear. Young people are growing increasingly uncertain whether the institutions around them exist to protect or merely control them.
And yet, amid all this, something even more dangerous has slowly emerged.
Normalisation.
The normalisation of insecurity, institutional failure, and grief.
Nigeria now consumes tragedy at a frightening pace. Mass killings trend briefly on social media before disappearing beneath the next outrage.
A nation overwhelmed by continuous tragedy eventually loses the ability to remember properly. Names disappear quickly. Faces vanish from public consciousness. Mourning is cut short by the arrival of the next crisis.
Societies that stop remembering human suffering also become consistently unable to value human life. Communities mourn quietly while the country moves on. Parents bury children while official statements recycle familiar language about investigations, condemnations, and renewed commitments to security.
At some point, one asks whether the nation is slowly becoming emotionally exhausted. This is one of the greatest hidden casualties of prolonged insecurity. Moral fatigue. The gradual exhaustion of a people repeatedly exposed to grief until compassion itself becomes difficult to sustain. Citizens begin to protect themselves emotionally by looking away. And once a society begins to look away from suffering to survive psychologically, something fundamental begins to break down within the national conscience.
That frightens me, because societies do not collapse only when buildings fall or governments fail; they also collapse when citizens lose the emotional capacity to feel others’ suffering.
Memorial Day matters because it insists that human lives must never become disposable memories. It reminds citizens that sacrifice should mean something. That the dead should not vanish into statistics. That national conscience requires remembrance.
Nigeria desperately needs that kind of moral reflection. Not only for the dead but also for the living, the child who is afraid to travel to school, the farmer who is afraid to return to his land, the student navigating broken institutions, the families trapped between insecurity and poverty, the healthcare workers operating inside collapsing systems, and for the ordinary person, they are increasingly caught between violence and institutional distrust.
Even while living this hazardous reality, some moments remind us why advocacy still matters. We rejoice that Justice Mark Chidiebere, popularly known as Justice Crack, is now out. That matters. His release is important not only for him as an individual but also because it reminds citizens that public pressure, civic engagement, and collective attention still have value.
But the advocacy cannot end there, because the larger issue was never only one person. The larger issue is the kind of society Nigeria is becoming…a society where criticism increasingly attracts suspicion. A society where institutions sometimes appear uncomfortable with accountability. A society where force occasionally seems easier to deploy than transparency.
At the same time, one must also resist the temptation to surrender entirely to cynicism. Democracies weaken when citizens stop believing improvement is possible. They weaken when fear replaces participation and silence becomes safer than truth.
That is why Memorial Day, even from afar, feels deeply relevant to the Nigerian condition.
It reminds us that citizenship carries obligations beyond personal survival.
It demands empathy. Memory. Solidarity.
It demands the willingness to speak when others are harmed, even when the victims do not look like us, pray like us, vote like us, or come from our region.
One of the deepest tragedies in Nigeria’s insecurity crisis has been selective outrage.
When violence happened in some regions, others looked away. The most uncomfortable truth is that many citizens believed distance would protect them. That insecurity affecting “other people” would somehow remain confined to other communities, other religions, or other regions. But violence rarely respects the boundaries societies create to distance themselves from suffering emotionally.
When farmers died, some dismissed it as regional politics.
When children were abducted, many mourned briefly before returning to normal life.
When communities burned, citizens filtered suffering through ethnicity, religion, or political affiliation. But violence ignored rarely stays contained.
Eventually, insecurity travels. Fear spreads. And societies discover too late that indifference has consequences, a reason why the famous warning by Martin Niemöller continues to endure across generations:
“Then they came for me, and there was no one left to speak for me.”
A healthy society does not wait until suffering becomes personal before recognising its danger.
As Americans pause this Memorial Day to honour those who died in service to their country, Nigerians, too, must reflect on the kind of nation we are shaping for the living.
Flags, speeches, or national anthems alone do not prove patriotism. It is proven by whether human life retains value within the conscience of the state and the hearts of citizens. And if we lose that, then no amount of political rhetoric, economic growth, or institutional ceremony will save us from becoming strangers to our own humanity.
In the end, the true collapse of a nation does not begin when governments fail or economies weaken. It begins when human beings slowly stop feeling the weight of one another’s pain. The moment citizens become emotionally comfortable with fear, grief, abduction, and death, society starts losing the very qualities that make civilisation possible. And no country, no matter how powerful its rhetoric or institutions, survives for long after it becomes indifferent to the humanity of its own people.
*Mr Ukoh, a PhD student and coauthor of Built By The Ancestors, writes from his base in New York, United States.
