There is a specific, pungent flavor of incompetence that can only be distilled in the halls of state-sponsored bureaucracy, and the Nigerian police force has just uncorked a vintage year. For those who haven’t been paying attention to the latest installment of ‘Whose Disappeared Citizen Is It Anyway?’, the script is as follows: gunmen descend upon a group of villagers, a triple-digit number of humans are spirited away into the void, and the official response from the authorities is a collective, synchronized shrug. The Nigerian police, in a display of gaslighting that would make a toxic ex-partner weep with envy, initially denied that anything untoward had occurred. It takes a certain level of intellectual arrogance to look at 172 missing bodies and suggest that perhaps they’ve all just gone on an unannounced, simultaneous spiritual retreat.

But eventually, the weight of the obvious became too heavy even for the most seasoned professional deniers. The police have now ‘confirmed’ the abductions. One must wonder what the threshold for ‘confirmation’ is in these circles. Did they wait for a formal RSVP from the kidnappers? Did they finally count the empty chairs at 172 dinner tables and realize the silence was a bit too loud? It is the quintessential performance of the state: deny the problem exists until the optics of the denial become more embarrassing than the reality of the failure. The police didn’t find the villagers; they just found their own eyes, which they had conveniently misplaced for several days while the victims were being marched into the bush.

Enter the Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN), the group providing the actual data while the government was busy practicing its ‘see no evil’ routine. In this desolate landscape of failure, we are forced to rely on a church alliance to act as the primary accountants of human misery. It’s a fascinating, if depressing, division of labor. The gunmen provide the chaos, the church provides the spreadsheets, and the government provides the fiction. One side sells salvation, the other sells terror, and the state sells a brand of stability that is about as structural as a wet cardboard box. To the church, these 172 souls are a tragedy; to the gunmen, they are leverage or labor; and to the Nigerian authorities, they are a PR nightmare that stubbornly refused to go away quietly.

And let us not forget the nine individuals who reportedly escaped. In the grand narrative of human suffering, these nine are usually framed as a ‘miracle’ or a ‘testament to the human spirit.’ In reality, they are likely just a testament to the fact that even kidnapping syndicates suffer from poor logistical oversight. In a world where 172 people can be vanished without a trace, the escape of nine is less a triumph of will and more a statistical error. They are the ones who fell off the back of the truck of despair because the driver hit a pothole. Their return serves only to highlight the absolute vacuum where the other 163 remain. They are the footnotes in a story where the main text is being redacted in real-time by an officialdom that finds truth to be an inconvenient distraction from the business of pretending to rule.

The global community, of course, will respond with its usual cocktail of performative concern and profound apathy. The Left will write long-form essays about the colonial roots of insecurity, managing to ignore the immediate, brutal agency of the men holding the rifles. The Right will use it as a talking point for why ‘over there’ is a lost cause, while quietly checking the price of West African crude. Neither side gives a solitary damn about the 172 villagers; they are merely convenient props in the ongoing theater of ideological posturing. Human life, in the macro-sense, is just currency. In Nigeria, that currency is currently undergoing hyper-inflation, with the value of a human soul dropping faster than the Naira.

So here we sit, watching the inevitable cycle repeat. The police have ‘confirmed’ the event, which is the bureaucratic equivalent of saying ‘my bad’ after accidentally burning down the house. There will be promises of ‘sweeping operations’ and ‘intensified efforts,’ phrases that have been hollowed out by decades of repetition until they are nothing but wind. The gunmen will continue their entrepreneurial approach to violence because, in a state this broken, crime isn’t just an alternative to the economy—it is the economy. And the 172, or 163, or whatever the number settles at once the next audit of agony is complete, will remain pawns in a game played by monsters and overseen by morons. It is a spectacle of such profound, multi-layered stupidity that one can only conclude that humanity isn’t just failing; it’s overachieving at it.