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From Noah Ebije, Kaduna
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, as repeated attacks in Shanga Local Government Area of Kebbi State, parts of the North Central region, and other areas of the country continue to expose what appears to be a widening and persistent security collapse.
In a statement issued by Dr Gbenga Hashim, an Amnesty International Prisoner of Conscience (1989), he said the true scale of the killings is being dangerously underreported and increasingly normalised.
According to Hashim, attacks in Shanga Local Government Area of Kebbi State in the past week reportedly left over 40 people dead and houses burnt, with local sources indicating the toll may be higher as the number of casualties continues to rise. He said similar attacks a few weeks earlier claimed seven lives, while the community had faced persistent attacks from terrorists without any form 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.
He further stated that in Kwara State, coordinated attacks across Kaiama, Baruten, and Ifelodun have left between 20 and 50 people dead in recent weeks, including five forest guards, noting that many of these incidents barely register beyond local reporting channels.
Across the wider North Central region, Hashim said the situation is escalating without meaningful international alarm. In Benue State, repeated attacks have reportedly killed between 50 and over 100 people within weeks. In Plateau State, coordinated night raids have left between 30 and 80 people dead, while Niger State has recorded between 20 and 50 fatalities, and Nasarawa State has suffered between 10 and 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 casualties that Hashim says is being met with “selective attention and dangerous silence”.
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 an 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.
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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.
Hashim also criticised the muted response of global institutions, noting that both the United Nations and the African Union have remained largely silent relative to the scale of ongoing mass killings.
According to him, apart from US President Donald Trump, who has shown consistent concern, most countries of the world have accepted the dehumanisation of Nigerian lives despite Nigeria’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 significantly from Nigeria’s past generosity and goodwill.
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.
Hashim posed a series of questions requiring global responses.
Why has the world become desensitised 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.
For many observers, he added, the issue is no longer only insecurity but also the collapse of global response mechanisms in the face of repeated human loss.
Hashim warned that this trajectory risks normalising mass death, where tragedy becomes routine, and urgency disappears, concluding that the reality remains unchanged: the killings continue, the numbers rise, and too many victims remain unseen and uncounted.
