There is something profoundly, almost artistically, useless about the modern police statement. It is a literary genre designed to provide the illusion of activity while describing a total vacuum of power. In the latest installment of Nigeria’s ongoing collapse into a collection of predatory fiefdoms, the police have once again performed their favorite ritual: the Confirmation of the Obvious. In Kaduna, a mass abduction of worshippers took place—a sentence so common in the Nigerian lexicon it carries about as much shock value as a weather report predicting rain in a monsoon. The police spokesperson, Benjamin Hundeyin, issued a statement on Tuesday night. He 'confirmed' the incident. Thank you, Benjamin. Without your clerical intervention, the families of the missing might have assumed their loved ones had simply ascended to heaven mid-hymn rather than being dragged into the bush by men with better equipment than the state.

Let’s dissect the anatomy of this theological kidnapping. The victims were worshippers. They went to a house of God, presumably to petition the Almighty for a respite from the grinding poverty and insecurity that defines their existence. They asked for daily bread and were delivered to the men who deal in the commerce of human flesh. It is the ultimate critique of faith: you go to seek divine protection, and you find only the cold, hard reality of a 7.62mm round. The kidnappers in Kaduna are, if nothing else, the most honest actors in the country. They don't pretend to govern; they don't pretend to care about the social contract; they simply recognize that in a failed state, the most liquid asset is a human being with a terrified family. It is a pure, unadulterated free market, and business is booming while the pews are emptying.

Then we have the state’s response, a masterclass in administrative somnambulism. The 'confirmation' of a mass abduction is the bureaucratic equivalent of a shrug. It is the state admitting that its monopoly on violence has been successfully challenged, outsourced, and perfected by gangs of motorcycle-bound entrepreneurs. The government in Abuja will, no doubt, follow this confirmation with the standard template of 'vowing' to 'bring the perpetrators to book.' I’ve always wondered about this 'book.' It must be the largest library in the world, given how many thousands of criminals have been 'vowed' into its pages without ever actually seeing the inside of a courtroom. The political class on both sides of the aisle will use this as a momentary rhetorical cudgel—the opposition decrying the lack of security they also failed to provide, and the incumbents insisting that the 'security architecture' is being 'overhauled' for the seventeenth time this year.

To the international community, this is merely another data point in the 'Dark Continent' narrative, a tragedy to be observed with a distance that borders on the clinical. If a dozen people were snatched from a cathedral in Paris or a megachurch in Dallas, the world would stop spinning. But in Kaduna, the lives of worshippers are treated as a rounding error in the global tally of misery. The Left will blame colonial legacies and systemic inequality, offering nothing but academic sympathy that buys exactly zero bags of rice for a ransom. The Right will mutter about 'failed cultures' and 'instability,' while simultaneously ignoring the fact that the weapons being used to clear out these churches were likely manufactured by the very military-industrial complexes they subsidize. Everyone has a take; no one has a solution, and the people in the middle are just meat for the grinder.

We are witnessing the final stage of the Nigerian experiment: a society where the only functioning infrastructure is the ransom pipeline. The police confirm the loss, the families bankrupt themselves to pay for the return, and the kidnappers reinvest the profits into better ammunition to ensure the next 'confirmation' is even more spectacular. It is a closed loop of despair. Religion, once the 'opium of the people,' has become the bait. You go to pray for a better life and end up being the collateral for a criminal’s new truck. The police spokesperson’s statement isn't news; it's a receipt for a transaction that the state was too weak to prevent and too indifferent to stop. We are all just waiting for our turn to be 'confirmed' as missing by a man in a crisp uniform who has already moved on to the next press release.