A former presidential candidate, Dr Gbenga Hashim, has said that a fresh wave of mass killings across Nigeria, many of them underreported, has intensified accusations of global indifference. Citing repeated attacks in Shanga Local Government Area of Kebbi State, the North Central geopolitical zone and other parts of the country, Hashim said they continue to expose what appears to be a widening and persistent security collapse.
Adding that the true scale of killings is being dangerously underreported and increasingly normalized, Hashim said recent attacks in Shanga reportedly left over 40 people dead and houses burnt ,with local sources indicating the toll may be higher than 40 as the figure rises every day.
He said similar attacks few weeks back claimed seven lives, while the community has faced persistent attacks from terrorists without any kind of security support from the government. He described the incident as another in a growing list of mass killings in rural Nigeria that fail to sustain national and global attention.
Hashim further stated that in Kwara State, coordinated attacks across Kaiama, Baruten and Ifelodun have left 20 to 50 people dead in recent weeks, including five forest guards. He noted that many of these incidents barely register beyond local reporting channels. He decried that across the wider North Central zone, the situation is escalating without meaningful international alarm.
“In Benue State, repeated attacks have reportedly killed 50 to over 100 people within weeks. In Plateau State, coordinated night raids have left 30 to 80 dead, while Niger State has recorded 20 to 50 fatalities, and Nasarawa State has suffered 10 to 20 deaths from spillover violence.
“Taken together, these reports suggest that between 130 and 300 people may have been killed within weeks across a single region, a scale of mass casualty being met with selective attention and dangerous silence,” he said.
The former presidential candidate and 2009 recipient of the Lord Max Berlof prize for Global Affairs warned that the widening gap between reality and global awareness has become morally troubling, arguing that mass killings in rural Nigeria are increasingly treated as routine statistics rather than urgent human catastrophe.
He also highlighted the continued operations of armed groups such as Boko Haram and Islamic State West Africa Province, alongside expanding bandit networks exploiting weak security presence, difficult terrain and delayed response systems.
At the national level, Hashim said the spread and repetition of attacks across multiple states point to a structural failure of security coordination rather than isolated incidents. He also criticized the muted response of global institutions, noting that both the United Nations (UN) and the African Union (AU) have remained largely silent relative to the scale of ongoing mass killings in Nigeria.
According to him, apart from President Donald Trump of the United States, who has shown consistent concerns, most countries of the world have accepted the dehumanization of Nigerian lives despite the country’s leading role in global peacekeeping missions to protect many across the world.
He specifically expressed deep concern about the silence of African countries that have benefited massively from Nigeria’s generosity and goodwill in the past. He said there is now a growing perception that Nigerian lives have been so devalued in global consciousness that even routine expressions of condolence are no longer made, raising what he described as a disturbing moral question about international priorities.
He queried: “Why has the world become desensitized to mass killings in Nigeria? Why do Nigerian deaths no longer trigger sustained global outrage or urgency? And how many more must die before silence itself is treated as complicity?” He said these questions are no longer rhetorical, but reflect what appears to be a global system increasingly selective in its moral attention. He added that for many observers, the issue is no longer only insecurity, but the collapse of global response mechanisms in the face of repeated human loss, warning that this trajectory risks normalizing mass death, where tragedy becomes routine and urgency disappears.
