In the grand, decaying theater of global governance, there is a recurring act that never fails to amuse the truly depraved: the Disappearing Act. This week, the production moved to Kaduna State, Nigeria, where 163 human beings allegedly evaporated from their church pews during Sunday services. The Nigerian authorities, however, have responded with a level of gaslighting so profound it would make a mid-level corporate HR manager weep with envy. Sule Shuaibu, the Commissioner for Internal Security in Kaduna State, didn't just dispute the numbers; he dismissed the entire concept of the event with the weary boredom of a man asked to care about a dropped penny. "The news is completely false; we have no evidence of any such attack," Shuaibu proclaimed, effectively telling the families of the missing that their trauma is simply a clerical error in the book of life.

Think about the logistics of 163 people vanishing. That is not a minor oversight; that is a small village's worth of souls. It is more people than you will likely ever invite to a wedding, yet to the Kaduna administration, it is a phantom. The reports specifically cite a mass kidnapping on Sunday, January 18, in the Kurmin Wali community of the Kajuru area. While parishioners were busy seeking divine intervention at the Evangelical Church Winning All (ECWA) and a local Catholic community, they were met with the ultimate secular intervention: being ignored by the state. The state’s stance is a masterclass in what I call the Ostrich Strategy: if the government doesn't acknowledge the blood on the floor, the floor is technically clean.

This isn’t just a regional failure; it is a peek into the future of global information management. In the West, we have the performative Left shrieking about micro-aggressions in air-conditioned safe spaces while the real world burns, and we have the moronic Right clutching their pearls over "traditional values" they couldn't define if their tax-exempt status depended on it. Both sides are unified in their absolute uselessness when reality becomes inconvenient. In Nigeria, they have simply skipped the subtext and gone straight to the source: if a problem is too large to solve, it simply did not happen. The efficiency is breathtaking. Why bother with search parties, forensic analysis, or tactical deployments when a single press release can erase 163 human beings from the ledger of reality? It is the ultimate administrative shortcut.

Shuaibu’s demand for "evidence" is the most delicious part of this tragedy. In a region where security is less a physical state and more a philosophical suggestion, what would suffice? A signed, notarized confession from the bandits? A synchronized TikTok dance by the 163 captives as they are marched through the brush? The demand for "evidence" in the face of mass disappearance is the ultimate weapon of the modern bureaucrat. It shifts the burden of proof from the protector to the victim. It turns the grieving into the accused, suggesting that if they can't provide a high-definition video and a GPS coordinate, then their loved ones are merely figments of a collective, feverish imagination.

The irony of the church settings cannot be ignored. The Evangelical Church Winning All (ECWA) and the Catholic faithful were gathered to petition a higher power, only to be reminded that the lower powers—the ones with the badges, the budgets, and the boredom—are far more indifferent to their survival. One wonders if "Winning All" included winning the prize of being the state's most inconvenient missing persons file. To the politicians, these people are statistics to be suppressed; to the activists, they are ammunition to be fired at the podium. They are the collateral damage of a world that has replaced empathy with optics.

We live in an era where truth is a consumer choice. If you are a supporter of the Kaduna administration, the kidnapping is a myth invented by political rivals to make the governor look bad. If you are a critic, it is an indictment of the state’s total collapse. Neither side actually cares about the 163 people. They are merely pawns in a game of narrative dominance. The Commissioner’s denial is just the most honest part of the whole sordid affair—he is openly admitting that the lives of these people are worth less than the ink it would take to report them missing. It is a cynical, brutal, and entirely human response to a crisis that requires actual work.

As the sun sets over Kaduna, 163 families are likely staring at empty chairs, while Sule Shuaibu probably sleeps the deep, untroubled sleep of a man who has successfully cleared his desk of a messy problem by declaring it non-existent. The faithful were looking for salvation in their churches, but they found the same thing everyone eventually finds when they look toward the state: a hollow void and a man in a suit telling them to stop imagining things. It’s not just a tragedy; it’s a prophecy. In the end, we are all just numbers waiting to be rounded down to zero by a government that finds our existence slightly too expensive to maintain. Welcome to the future of security: if we don't count you, you can't be missing.