Amid the growing diplomatic kerfuffle between Nigeria and the United States over the alleged genocide against Christians in the country’s north-central and north-eastern regions, the truth hides in plain sight. It is not in the official statements of the Nigerian Ministry of Information. Nor in the posturing of American diplomats. It lives instead in the ruins of abandoned villages, in the burned churches, in the silence of the displaced. Last week, I took a twelve-hour road trip through some of Nigeria’s most perilous landscapes. From Nasarawa to Benue, and on to Taraba. From the heartland of Christian communities that once thrived with dignity, to the hinterlands now left in despair. What I saw was not merely poverty. It was an absence. The total withdrawal of the Nigerian state from the lives of its citizens.

The road from Akwanga to Lafia is lined with farms long deserted. Herdsmen attacks, villagers said. In many areas, churches stood deserted. In Benue State, vast stretches of land lie empty, swallowed by bushes. The people who once tilled them now live in camps for internally displaced persons. Children who should be in school are growing into their teenage years without a future. The state neither sees them nor hears them. 

At Buruku, I crossed the River Benue on a makeshift canoe. A narrow, creaking wooden vessel that could barely carry a man and his pickup van. The official bridge project, announced with fanfare years ago, lies unfinished. Only ramparts and steel anchors are visible just above the face of the water. The locals no longer wait for government promises. They build their canoes, row across, and hope to survive the journey. In Nigeria, neglect is policy. It is neither an accident nor an oversight. It is the deliberate outcome of politics built on dominance and exclusion. The Christian communities of the north-central and the north-east are not just victims of terror; they are victims of the structural violence of the Nigerian state. Roads are left in ruins. Schools crumble. Hospitals vanish. Security is a privilege reserved for the powerful and their enclaves. When you travel through these lands, as I did, you feel how power has shifted and how the state has chosen who belongs and who does not. The politics of dominance runs deep. It is written in the budgets that never take the villages into account. This is evident in the excluded appointments. It is heard in the silences that follow each massacre. A conspiracy of forgetting, sanctioned by the powerful.

In Benue, I encountered a priest who kept a register of the dead. His church, once a place of worship, now shelters widows and orphans. He pointed at a long list of names. Whole families were wiped out by attacks that never made national headlines. “We count the dead because the country won’t”, he said. His words hung in the air like smoke. In a village straddling the boundary between Benue and Taraba States, the fields lie fallow. “We are farmers”, a man told me quietly, “but now we live on charity”. His wife stood beside him, nodding in silence. Around them, wild bushes had reclaimed deserted homes, speaking their own grim truth. In the end, nature abhors emptiness, and so does the human heart. There, the line between underdevelopment and violence has blurred. Poverty feeds insecurity; insecurity deepens poverty. The cycle continues.

Arriving in Taraba, and travelling through Kutep land – from Takum to Kpambo Puri and Lissam Ussa in-between – and crossing River Gamana to the farthest villages on the southernmost tip of the north east, the neglect by both national and subnational governments becomes too visible to deny. In fact, visible signs of development seem to stop abruptly at the gates of General TY Danjuma’s hospital in Takum. Beyond, the landscape dissolves into a wilderness of neglect, stretching from Lissam Ussa deep into the remote reaches toward Kpambo Puri. Roads crumble into gullies, schools stand roofless, and healthcare is a distant memory. Lissam Ussa and its surrounding communities have been without public electricity for an entire year. Try to imagine that. In this expanse, the absence of the state is palpable. 

The people are left to fend for themselves, navigating a terrain where every journey is a test of endurance, and every day is a struggle against both poverty and insecurity. Even the police station in Lissam Ussa still bears the rusted roof first laid by the colonial administrators —a relic of an age that has endured longer than the state intended to replace it. What remains is resilience and the quiet determination to live despite abandonment. This is not just the story of geography. It is the story of power. The Nigerian federation has long functioned as an empire of extraction, not of inclusion. The peripheries exist to feed the centre, while the centre decides who is seen and who is erased. Within Nigeria’s politics of resource distribution, appointments, development projects, religion and ethnicity shape who counts as a citizen.

The recent diplomatic spat between Nigeria and the United States only amplifies this tragic truth. America calls it persecution; Nigeria calls it propaganda. Yet, the bodies buried in mass graves in Plateau, Benue, and southern Kaduna are not diplomatic abstractions. They are evidence. Of a country at war with its conscience. Of a government unwilling to protect those it swore to serve. The Nigerian elite hide behind sovereignty. They accuse the West of imperial motives. They speak of foreign interference, of attempts to recolonise Nigeria and exploit its natural resources. There are, even now, weary scholars who make a living recycling such tired conspiracy theories. But sovereignty without responsibility is an empty phrase. When the state fails to secure life and dignity for its citizens, it forfeits the moral basis of sovereignty.

I stood on the dilapidated road running through Lissam Ussa to Cameroon as the sun sank behind the Kutep rockhills. The land was beautiful and desolate. In the distance, church bells tolled, their echoes fading into the silence of the rockhills. Faith endures here, yet fear shadows it. What binds the people is not merely belief, but the daily struggle to survive. The great poet, T.S. Eliot, once wrote about a wasteland of human neglect. Standing there, I understood him. Nigeria’s fringes have become that wasteland. The visible face of a broken covenant between the state and the people. A landscape where absence has replaced governance, and where the silence of the forgotten becomes the only language left.

A journey into the country should be a journey into the soul of my country. Instead, it reveals its decay. The ruined villages are mirrors held up to Nigeria’s conscience. The people ask simple questions: Who protects us? Who sees us? Who will rebuild what terror has taken? There are no answers yet. Only echoes. Only the long road stretching ahead, dusty and uncertain. A road that leads not to hope, but to the quiet knowledge that a nation that forgets its own will soon forget itself. Milan Kundera once wrote that “the struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting”.

He is right. Damn right.

Abdul Mahmud, a human rights attorney in Abuja, writes weekly for The Gazette