We must begin with a solemn condolence to the 16 Nigerians brutally lynched by a mob in Uromi, Edo State, on Thursday last week. They had all planned to spend this Eid-el-Fitr holiday with their families in the northern part of this country. But they didn’t get home, and didn’t even live to tell their story as they were burned alive by a mob of locals in Edo State, just for who they were and nothing more. May their souls find peace, and may Allah grant their families the fortitude to bear the loss.

Now, much has been said about this latest sad event in our national life. And yet, there is still more left unsaid. For me, the most important thing to say about the Uromi incident is that it represents a clear example of the diverging system of human rights between northern and southern Nigeria. You would struggle to put a finger on how or why it has happened. But it seems to me that Nigeria has presently evolved into a nation of two different human rights systems. If you are from Southern Nigeria, you had some rights and those rights are by and large guaranteed. If, however, you are from Northern Nigeria, your rights, including your right to life, means very little in the current Nigerian setting.

Let me first be clear. In his book, ‘Citizens and Subjects: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism’, the Ugandan sociologist, Mahmood Mamdani makes the point that colonialism in Africa has had the still persisting effect of dividing Africans into two very different groups of people: citizens and subjects. For Mamdani, “citizens” in each of the African countries, are the tiny minority of people integrated into the modern state, which embodies aspects of European modernity such as equality, human rights, participation, and most importantly, the legal protection of the state.

In Eastern and Southern Africa, Mamdani says, these “citizens” are the settler whites and the small number of local African elites co-opted into the governing system of the state, society and economy. In the rest of Africa, where there are no settler whites, “citizens’ are the small class of mostly “western educated” and urban elites who simply stepped into the shoes of the European colonisers, following the end of colonial rule in the 1960s and 1970s. For Mamdani, “subjects”, on the other hand, are the majority of Africans outside of these governing classes to whom norms of modernity such as equality, human rights and representation typically do not apply.

In Nigeria particularly, the difference in life outcomes between the minority “citizens” and majority “subjects” in this Mamdanian sense cannot be more marked. Citizens enjoy access to government and its resources, both legal and corruptly taken, and above all they enjoy legal and physical protection from the state. For example, more than half of Nigeria’s policemen are deployed for the protection of a handful of people in government and other elites, while the rest of us ordinary Nigerians wallow not just in want and penury but also in physical insecurity, without any state protection.

If ordinary Nigerians suffer from poverty, or serious health outcomes, or from floods or other natural disasters, or from attacks by mobs, they are simply left to their own devices, and in most cases, they die or perish, without any form of protection or compensation from the state. But these fates simply do not befall those in government or members of the elite, properly defined. And when they do, the “citizens’’ enjoy protection from the state or have access to resources that give them the sort of options ordinary citizens do not have, and cannot have.

At this broadest level of Mamdanian citizens and subjects, then, there is not much difference between north and south. Your whole life, and your life outcomes, all depend on whether you fall into the category of ‘citizen’ or ‘subject’, regardless of which part of the country you hail from. Yet, my point is that even within this general structure of inequality and unequal opportunities in Nigeria, you are still worse off if you are from northern Nigeria. In particular, your life means nothing to the Nigerian state if you are a northerner. Let me give a few examples.

Nigerian military personnel have allegedly committed all sorts of crimes during operations in the northern parts of the country, including, alleged rape and outright extra-judicial killings. Nigerian military aircraft have repeatedly bombed and killed hundreds of northerners in their homes, farms or during basic cultural gatherings like weddings or Maulud celebrations. Yet, hardly anything happens to the alleged culprits. In fact, in many of these repeated cases of “collateral damage” by the Nigeria Air Force, even an admission of responsibility is often difficult to come by from the authorities, let alone an apology or justice in the form of proper investigation and punishment of those involved. Sometimes, the authorities simply release a terse statement, and just move on to the next case, as if nothing has happened.

At other times, the Nigerian state simply looks away when mobs of criminal gangs mete out unspoken violence against people in this part of the country. For example, in Sokoto State a few years ago, a group of travellers, including women and children, were burned alive in their vehicle by bandits. Nothing happened afterwards. There was no attempt to chase after the bandits and say never again. And as many have already pointed out in the past few days, many northerners have been lynched and killed in Southeast Nigeria, often on the flimsiest excuses, without any positive and significant action from the Nigerian government or the authorities.

In my view, therefore, the sort of barbarity perpetrated at Uromi last week only feeds into the massive disregard for northern life by the state itself, and by the institutions of society such as the media. Consider, for example, the massive furore that was generated during the “EndSARS” crisis a few years ago with the sort of silence and whimpers that follow whenever military officials shell and kill northerners in their homes or farms during so-called operations against Boko Haram or bandits. Compare also how some northerners have been tortured by the police or disappeared for weeks, months or years merely for speaking out against government on social media.

All it takes to justify extra-judicial violence by the Nigerian police or military personnel on northerners is merely to invoke “Boko-Haram”, ‘Fulani herdsmen”, “bandits”, “kidnappers” and so on, as if everyone in Northern Nigeria is all of those things combined. The point, then, is that it is this language and these tactics of justifying extra-judicial violence on northerners by the agents of the state that southern mobs copy and emulate when they do the same things against northerners in their domains.

This is why it keeps happening, again and again. As long as the government and its security agents do not value the lives of people on this side of the country, the government is simply giving a blank cheque to mobs down south to do just the same. This is why we must all rise up around this latest incident at Uromi and say never again.