A culture of violence

An average of 28 Nigerians were killed each day of last year by deliberate malicious intent

Terrorists recently killed more than 200 people in Anka and Bukkuyum LGAs of Zamfara State. It was sad news.

What was even sadder and incredibly worrying was how the country barely got moved by the news.

In my view, this reaction did not come from a loathing for the people of Zamfara. It was from the indifference that comes when a culture of violence has taken root and is then augmented by a constant stream of bad news leaving people numb. This is a very dangerous position for a society to be in because the numbness impacts how other situations are felt, processed, and acted on.

Over the years, Nigeria’s political class has by its actions and inactions created a culture that has made brute force the choice medium of communication and a legitimate currency. A growing number of Nigerians have learned to speak and trade in that language. The use of violence to solve problems in a society where the end is seen to justify the means has taken us to a point where our hearts are so calloused that 200 people being slaughtered in one location wasn’t emotionally resonant enough to hold a prime position in the news cycle for a full day.

Over the past few years, Nigeria has increasingly rewarded violence and punished proper behaviour. People are taking notes

The Syrian War has been going on for 11 years and last year, 3,746 people were killed in it. Nigeria has not officially declared itself as being at war but its death toll from insecurity in 2021 was at least 10,366 meaning that an average of 28 Nigerians were killed each day of last year by deliberate malicious intent.

When one looks at the sources of these figures be they from the Boko Haram crisis to the bizarrely named “bandit situation” up North to the IPOB situation in the Southeast and others, it is clear that a culture of violence has taken root in Nigerian society. More and more, Nigerians are being convinced that they are likelier to be heard, respected, and rewarded if they develop and advertise a capacity for violence. Nigeria is a place where people have ended up retiring wealthy simply because they shot their way into power at some point.

Almost every reasonable person agrees that this problem has to be solved, but truth is that a cultural change is what is needed. This requires that we understand how cultures are set in place to start with.

Culture is the sum of the ideas, customs, and social behaviour of a particular people or society to fulfil a range of purposes. I will not belabour you with the story of the monkeys and the ice bath, I’ll simply point out that the newly introduced monkeys in that story merely stayed true to the culture they had been introduced into without even knowing why it existed in the first place.

There are some lessons for Nigeria in that story. One is that Nigerians have been programmed into the behavioural patterns they have today and we have to deliberately create a counterculture that reprograms them by consistently rewarding people for exhibiting the behaviours that we prefer to be prevalent in our society.