“But for the sake of our country, we must tend to the wound in our collective soul. We must interrogate the rot that allows such evil to gestate, the impunity that emboldens it, and the broken society that failed to notice”.
BY OLUSEGUN ADENIYI
There are tragedies that make you question everything you thought you understood about human nature. The massacre of Fatima Abubakar and her six children in the Dorayi Chiranchi area of Kano on January 17 belongs firmly in that category. Haruna Bashir returned from the market that Friday evening to find his entire family butchered. His wife. Six children. Killed with heavy metal objects. Some reports mention a sewing machine used as a weapon for the horror. But those gory details don’t even matter. When a traumatised Bashir speaks of the tragedy, he calls it “a wound that would never heal.”
What other words are there to describe such a calamity? The English language has no adequate vocabulary for a father who must bury his wife and all (six) children in one day. But here is where this story becomes even darker and more sinister. The alleged mastermind is not a stranger who broke through the window or a gang from another neighbourhood. It is a 23-year-old nephew of the deceased woman by name Umar. Blood. Family. The young man who had eaten from their pot, who knew when the husband left for market, which window did not lock properly, and where the children slept. The person you would trust at your door because he shares your DNA. But the suspect turned blood ties into a cover for murder.
The police deserve credit for their swift action. Within hours, they had arrested the principal suspect and two accomplices. They recovered bloodstained clothes, the victims’ mobile phones, cutlasses, clubs, and other weapons. The young man reportedly confessed to leading the attack. And then came the haunting revelation: This was not the suspect’s first massacre. If you tried to write this as fiction in Nigeria, no editor would accept it as believable. These are the kinds of stories you read about other lands. Jack the Ripper. Pedro Lopez. And many such characters who just kill for fun. Or, as in this case, those who engage in ‘familicide’ in which the victims are members of their own families.
According to residents who aided in the capture of Umar, the young man had allegedly killed two other housewives in the Tudun Yola area, just two months earlier in November 2025. He reportedly murdered them in similar fashion and set their houses ablaze. One of those victims was his aunt. And nothing happened afterwards. No arrest. No investigation that led anywhere. Life went on. And so, emboldened by impunity, he murdered seven more people. The pertinent question here: How many of such killings has he been involved in that we missed?
An obviously angry father of the principal suspect has asked that Umar be quickly tried and “eliminated to allow for a sane environment”. But this is not your everyday crime. And the police will do well not to treat it the usual way. This is not a crime in which you parade suspects before the camera to field questions from some journalists. They need to be subjected to serious interrogation by experts so as to ascertain not only the motivation but also to know more about accomplishes and perhaps also whether they have groups who specialise in such crimes. “I’m quite sure that Umar has been committing several crimes which we were not aware of, but now that he has been arrested, he should be punished accordingly,” his father said while also confirming the suspicion of many. “I’m suspecting that the same Umar is behind the killings of the Darayi Hausa wife’s junior sister sometimes last month.”
This is where we must pause and ask ourselves the difficult questions. How does a young man commit a double murder, burn a house to cover his tracks, and simply return to his regular life? What does it say about our society when such crimes disappear into the ether as though they never happened?
The answer, uncomfortable as it is, points to a society where life has become terrifyingly cheap, and violence no longer shocks us into action. The mechanisms meant to protect citizens, the basic social contract that says “we will not let evil go unpunished”, have broken down so completely that a murderer can walk freely among us, while planning his next attack. But this is more than the failings of the authorities.
We often speak about insecurity in Nigeria as though it is only about Boko Haram/bandits in the forests, or kidnappers on our highways. But insecurity also lives in our neighbourhoods, in supposedly loving homes. It is the woman who cannot be sure her drink is not poisoned or the mother who leaves her children at home with some aunties, cousins, uncles, believing they are safe, only to return to carnage. We live in a society where people take things for granted. But we must begin to understand that many of the things we read elsewhere have been happening in Nigeria. Only that we have not been paying attention.
Governor Abba Kabir Yusuf’ has vowed that the perpetrators would face “the full wrath of the law”. Yes, Umar and the two accomplishes must be prosecuted and brought to justice. But what about the system and society that failed Fatima Abubakar and her children long before that terrible Friday? What about the earlier victims whose deaths were never properly investigated? What about all the other Umars who are walking free today because their first crimes went unpunished?
For sure, these are not the first home killings that have shocked us as a nation. On 21 June 2015, a former Vice Chancellor of Federal University of Technology, Akure, Professor Albert Ilemobade, was stragulated to death at his residence by two domestic staff. On 31 October 2018, the Chairman of Credit Switch Technology in Nigeria, Mr Ope Badamosi was stabbed to death at his Ikoyi, Lagos residence. On 1st December 2021, Mrs. Maria Igbinedion (mother of former Edo State Governor, Lucky Igbinedion) was clubbed to death by her domestic servant. On 31 July 2024, Dr. Aribemchukwu Ajumogobia, the daughter of Justice Rita Ofili-Ajumogobia, was stabbed to death at her Ikoyi, Lagos residence. The list of such bestial killings is very long. But this one is on a different scale: A young man brutally wiping out his aunt and all her children in one moment of madness.
The philosopher Hannah Arendt wrote about the ‘banality of evil’—how the most horrific acts are often committed not by monsters, but by ordinary people operating in systems that have normalized violence and injustice. Umar Auwalu is 23 years old. What did he see? What did he learn? What did he experience that made him capable of a crime of this magnitude? And more importantly, what did our society fail to do that allowed him to become an alleged serial killer?
Haruna Bashir’s wound will never heal. But for the sake of our country, we must tend to the wound in our collective soul. We must interrogate the rot that allows such evil to gestate, the impunity that emboldens it, and the broken society that failed to notice. I commiserate with Haruna Bashir. May the good Lord comfort him and other members of his family at this most difficult period.
- You can follow me on my X (formerly Twitter) handle, @Olusegunverdict and on www.olusegunadeniyi.com
