By Dakuku Peterside
When dawn cracks open the Nigerian sky these days, the first breath many people take is heavy with questions that shouldn’t linger in a country as rich in potential as Nigeria. It used to be enough to worry about food on the table or the children’s school fees, but now an even more primal fear sits beside those old burdens: “Am I safe enough to see tomorrow?”
Once upon a time, these worries were spoken in hushed tones only in the North-East, in places where Boko Haram and ISWAP turned towns into ghost settlements and farms into mass graves. But now, fear has found new postcodes, new voices, and new victims. From wedding convoys ambushed on the road in Plateau to explosions rocking markets in Kano, from gun battles in Kaduna’s streets to soldiers ambushed in Niger State, the message is clear: the fear of sudden violence is no longer distant. It has become the air we breathe.
