Northern Nigeria: An Unconscious Society or a Society Trapped by Its Own Silence?
By Chairman Nigeria Union of Journalists Sokoto state council, Usman Mohammed Binji.
For over a decade, Northern Nigeria has been engulfed in one of the gravest security crises in its history. Banditry, terrorism, kidnapping, communal conflicts, and mass killings have claimed thousands of lives, displaced communities, disrupted education, destroyed livelihoods, and left many citizens living in fear and uncertainty. Yet, despite the scale of the tragedy, there appears to be limited collective outrage or organized public pressure capable of compelling authorities to provide lasting solutions.
This reality raises an uncomfortable sociological question: Has Northern Nigeria become an unconscious society?
Sociologists often distinguish between a conscious society and an unconscious society.
A conscious society recognizes its most pressing challenges and directs its energy toward addressing them. Citizens actively engage with issues affecting their collective survival, question authority, demand accountability, and unite around common causes. Such societies understand that security, education, healthcare, and economic well-being are not merely government responsibilities but collective concerns.
An unconscious society, however, is one whose attention is diverted from fundamental problems to less consequential matters. It is not necessarily ignorant or unintelligent. Rather, it becomes preoccupied with distractions while existential challenges continue unchecked. Public discourse revolves around personalities, entertainment, and political rivalries while matters of life and death receive only fleeting attention.
The Northern Nigerian experience increasingly reflects this contradiction. Every week, reports emerge of communities attacked by bandits, innocent citizens killed, farmers prevented from accessing their farmlands, and families displaced from their ancestral homes. Yet, social media platforms, tea gatherings, and public conversations often appear more animated by celebrity controversies and political gossip than by discussions on insecurity and governance.
The recent social media drama involving Salim Goje, his wife, and Hadiza Gabon provides a revealing example. For days, countless social media users across Northern Nigeria will passionately debate, analyse, defend, and condemn the individuals involved. Timelines will be flooded with opinions, arguments, videos, and commentaries. While citizens have every right to discuss entertainment and public personalities, the intensity of engagement raises an important question: Why do celebrity disputes often attract more public attention than the continuous loss of lives across the region?
French sociologist Émile Durkheim argued that societies are held together by what he called a collective conscience a shared awareness of common interests and values. When a society possesses a strong collective conscience, threats to communal survival provoke collective action. Citizens see the suffering of others as a matter of public concern. However, when that collective consciousness weakens, society becomes fragmented, and individuals become more concerned with personal or trivial interests than collective challenges.
Karl Marx offers another explanation through his concept of false consciousness. According to Marx, people can become so consumed by secondary issues that they lose sight of the structures responsible for their suffering. Attention becomes focused on distractions while deeper questions of governance, security, poverty, and development remain unaddressed. The result is a population that debates symptoms while ignoring causes.
Similarly, Antonio Gramsci’s theory of cultural hegemony suggests that societies can gradually accept abnormal conditions as normal. When insecurity becomes a daily reality, citizens may unconsciously adapt to it. Instead of demanding change, they begin to view violence, poor governance, and institutional failure as inevitable features of life. In such circumstances, outrage diminishes, and resignation takes its place.
Another useful concept is learned helplessness. Communities repeatedly exposed to violence and disappointment may eventually lose confidence in their ability to influence outcomes. After years of promises, military operations, and political rhetoric, many people may feel powerless.
Consequently, they might withdraw from collective action and retreat into entertainment, social media debates, and other distractions that provide temporary escape from harsh realities.
This does not mean Northerners are indifferent to suffering. On the contrary, countless families have lost loved ones, livelihoods, and homes to insecurity.
The issue is not the absence of concern but the absence of sustained collective mobilization. Grief remains private when it should become public action. Anger remains an individual when it should become collective advocacy.
Perhaps the greatest challenge facing Northern Nigeria today is not merely banditry or terrorism but the normalization of these tragedies. A society that reacts more passionately to celebrity scandals than to the killing of its citizens risks becoming a spectator society a society that watches, comments, jokes, and debates but rarely organizes itself to demand change.
History teaches that progress occurs when citizens prioritize issues that affect their collective future. Security, justice, education, healthcare, and economic opportunity must occupy the centre of public discourse. Entertainment, politics, and celebrity affairs have their place, but they must never overshadow matters of life and survival.
The question, therefore, is not whether Northern Nigeria is unconscious. The question is whether its people are willing to awaken a stronger collective consciousness one that places human life above distractions, demands accountability from leaders, and transforms shared suffering into shared action.
Until that happens, the North may continue to mourn its victims while arguing over its distractions.
