Babayola M. Toungo
About ten years ago, the Nigerian public sphere went into convulsion. A poor wheelbarrow pusher known as Yunusa, alias Yellow, was accused of abducting a young girl, transporting her across state lines, impregnating her and forcefully converting her to Islam. The response was not measured. It was volcanic. Islam itself was dragged before the court of public opinion. Northern identity was indicted. Civil society mobilized at lightning speed. Commentators framed the case as proof of a creeping religious agenda. The accused was arrested, returned, prosecuted, convicted and sentenced. The system moved with astonishing clarity and moral confidence. The nation applauded itself for defending justice.
Today, we confront allegations that mirror that earlier moral gravity. A young girl from Jigawa. Allegations of abduction. Allegations of sexual exploitation. Allegations of forced conversion – this time from Islam to Christianity. The accused is reportedly an Igbo man and a serving officer of the Department of State Services, an institution lodged within the security spine of the Nigerian state. And yet the outrage has evaporated. The silence is not confusion. It is ideology at work.
Nigeria does not experience outrage organically; outrage is manufactured within a hierarchy of power. What we call “public reaction” is often a reflection of who controls narrative machinery, who enjoys institutional insulation, and whose identity is already coded as suspect.
In the Yunusa episode, the accused was economically marginal and institutionally naked. A wheelbarrow pusher is the lowest rung in Nigeria’s social pyramid – disposable, unprotected, voiceless. He could be symbolized without resistance. He could be converted into a metaphor. His religion could be turned into a collective indictment because he had no structural capacity to fight back. Powerless individuals are the safest targets for moral theatre.
But when an allegation touches someone embedded within the security establishment, the tone shifts. The state, by nature, protects its own. Security agencies operate within cultures of opacity and solidarity. Media organizations, dependent on licensing regimes and vulnerable to regulatory pressure, instinctively soften confrontation. Activists who once roared discover caution. Politicians who once sermonized discover nuance. This is not hypocrisy alone; it is hegemony.
Hegemony is the subtle conditioning of society to see some narratives as urgent and others as inconvenient. It is the quiet shaping of what becomes scandal and what becomes background noise. It determines which crimes are framed as civilizational threats and which are reframed as isolated aberrations.
In the earlier case, religion was weaponized instantly. The alleged conversion to Islam was treated as ideological aggression. Commentators did not hesitate to draw sweeping cultural conclusions. Islam was placed under suspicion. The North was cast as expansionist. A singular criminal allegation was inflated into communal evidence.
Now the direction of alleged conversion is reversed. A Muslim girl from Jigawa allegedly converted to Christianity. The accused is Igbo. The religious polarity has flipped. And suddenly religion becomes a private matter. Suddenly we are warned against generalization. Suddenly collective attribution becomes inappropriate. What changed? Not the principle. The identity of the accused.
This exposes an uncomfortable truth: in Nigeria, identity determines the scale of moral amplification. When the accused aligns with a pre-existing stereotype of danger, outrage becomes virtuous. When the accused disrupts that stereotype, outrage becomes “sensitive.” When the accused belongs to a group perceived as historically dominant or threatening, the crime is civilizational. When he belongs to a group shielded by institutional influence or sympathetic media framing, the crime is individualized. That is not justice. That is narrative politics.
Even more troubling is the class dimension. A wheelbarrow pusher embodies social expendability. A security officer embodies state authority. Nigeria’s moral reflex appears calibrated against class and institutional location. We are braver in condemning poverty than in confronting power.
And this is where the ideological critique deepens: Nigeria’s public morality is not anchored in universal principles; it is anchored in power relations. Civil society outrage is often less about victims and more about symbolic capital. Certain cases become opportunities to reinforce preferred political narratives. Others are inconvenient because they destabilize those narratives. This is how selective justice becomes normalized.
When forced conversion to Islam fits an existing anxiety, it becomes a national emergency. When forced conversion to Christianity unsettles comfortable assumptions, it becomes a delicate matter requiring restraint. When an accused from a marginalized class is involved, punishment affirms order. When an accused linked to state security is involved, caution affirms stability.
But what of the victim? The tragedy of selective outrage is that victims become secondary to ideology. Their suffering is instrumentalized when useful and minimized when awkward. Their pain becomes a vehicle for identity contestation rather than a call to universal justice. A republic cannot survive such moral asymmetry.
Nigeria is already a federation stitched together by fragile compromises of faith and ethnicity. If justice appears to oscillate according to tribe or religion, then each community will retreat into defensive suspicion. Every silence will be interpreted as bias. Every muted reaction will be read as evidence of hierarchy. And once citizens conclude that justice depends on who you are rather than what was done, the social contract begins to disintegrate.
This is not a call for hysteria. It is a call for consistency. Allegations must be investigated. Evidence must be weighed. Due process must be protected. But consistency in moral reaction is not optional; it is foundational. If we invoked religion then, we cannot pretend religion is irrelevant now. If we treated abduction and forced conversion as existential threats then, we cannot downgrade them to procedural footnotes now. Otherwise, we must admit the uncomfortable truth: our outrage is not principled. It is positional. And positional morality is one of the surest accelerants of national fracture.
Nigeria must choose whether justice is universal or tribal, whether outrage is equal or strategic, whether the law scrutinizes power or shields it. Because if identity continues to determine the volume of our conscience, then what we are building is not a nation governed by law, but a federation governed by preference.
And preference masquerading as principle is a slow-burning fuse beneath an already fragile state.
