By Okechukwu Nwanguma
There are moments in a nation’s journey when a single image captures the depth of its collective moral decay. The sight of innocent school children, drenched by cold rain and car splashes as they stood in formation to welcome a visiting president—who came not in triumph but allegedly to commiserate with a grieving people—is one such image. It is both tragic and telling.
In Benue State this week, under the watch of a so-called clergy-turned-governor, hundreds of school children were paraded along major roads to perform a rousing welcome for President Bola Tinubu, a leader who has demonstrated, time and again, a spectacular lack of empathy, competence, or urgency in addressing the worsening insecurity plaguing the nation. These were not just children. They were children of a state in mourning—many possibly from homes that had just buried loved ones savagely murdered in recent massacres by Fulani terrorists.
This orchestrated charade—complete with national anthems and dripping school uniforms—was not merely tone-deaf. It was obscene. It was a public theatre of power intoxication, a grotesque display of performative politics by a governor who, rather than shepherd his grieving people, chose instead to sacrifice the dignity of their children on the altar of presidential vanity.
What sort of man—what sort of father, cleric, or leader—sees a mass grave and responds with a marching band? What government turns a condolence visit into a carnival of absurdity?
The answer is simple: one drunk on power and blind to the pain of the people. One who sees public service not as a sacred duty but as a stage for sycophancy and personal aggrandisement.
The president himself, Bola Ahmed Tinubu, deserves no applause for this shameful spectacle. His government has proven time and again to be incapable of stemming the tide of bloodshed across the Middle Belt and beyond. He arrives in Benue not with solutions or urgency but to be celebrated by singing children, herded into the rain to pretend that all is well. It is an insult added to injury.
But perhaps the most damning element of this entire debacle is the complicity of the parents and teachers—those who should be guardians of the children’s well-being. What possessed them to allow their children to be used for such tasteless propaganda in a moment that demanded solemnity and national introspection? What twisted logic rationalised a scene in which children, possibly mourning siblings, classmates, or neighbours, were made to sing and smile for cameras and a clueless president?
Is this what we’ve become? A people so battered by misrule, so stripped of dignity, that even in mourning we perform for our oppressors?
Oby Ezekwesili put it bluntly: The political class in Nigeria treats citizens as conquered souls. And they are not entirely wrong to think so, for what conquering army ever enjoyed such fawning loyalty from the very people it has failed and brutalised? Until citizens rise in collective defiance of these dehumanising spectacles—until we stop dancing in the rain for those who do not care whether we live or die—there will be no incentive for our rulers to change.
The truth is bitter: Benue’s governor failed his people, not only by failing to protect them from repeated bloodshed but by forcing them to smile through their tears for a president who has done little but issue bland statements and empty gestures. And the people failed themselves, too, by allowing it.
We must learn to draw the line. Grief must not be commodified. Children must not be props. Governance must not be reduced to performance art. We must begin to demand seriousness from our leaders and decency from ourselves. Because what happened in Benue is not just a failure of leadership. It is a collapse of our collective sense of shame.
And if we don’t push back, if we don’t speak out, this shame will be our legacy.
Okechukwu Nwaguma is the Executive Director of the Rule of Law and Accountability Advocacy Centre and former National Coordinator at Network on Police Reform in Nigeria (NOPRIN).
Follow the AkweyaTV channel on WhatsApp: https://whatsapp.com/channel/0029Va7m7dvJuyA7h5XMc22i
