Philo, Tersoo, Ibee: We Are All Abincin Gara -By Prince Charles Dickson, PhD

It has been one hell of a season.

The kind in which the telephone rings and your heart begins negotiating with God before you answer. The kind in which “I spoke with her recently” and “I saw him just the other day” become the helpless grammar of grief. Death arrives, and every recent conversation becomes evidence in a case nobody can win.

First, Philo.

Consistent, unassuming, quietly luminous. A damsel, a mother in our development space, one of those people who did not need a loudspeaker to prove she mattered. In a country where many announce their generosity before the generosity itself arrives, Philo simply showed up. She served. She stayed. She became part of the furniture of goodness, so dependable that we forgot furniture, too, can disappear from the room.

Then Tersoo.

Brother. Husband. Father. Chairman of the Bearded Gang. Arsenal FC aficionado, which means he had already developed a spiritual tolerance for hope, disappointment and the mysterious suffering of the righteous. How do you tell the story of a man whose laughter, beard, football arguments and family devotion had become part of other people’s lives? Yesterday he was a voice, a joke and a plan. Today he is a photograph beneath which people write, “Gone too soon.”

Then Ibee Mbaya.

Philo and Tersoo died. Ibee was murdered.

Let us not decorate the horror with the lazy phrase “jungle justice,” because there was no justice in that jungle. There was only cruelty wearing the torn uniform of public anger. There were hands that attacked, eyes that watched and phones that recorded. A human being was being destroyed, and some apparently decided their most urgent moral duty was to get a clear video.

That is not merely a crime scene. It is a mirror.

It forces us to ask what prolonged violence has done to our collective nervous system. What has conflict taught young people raised around suspicion, retaliation and the casual language of blood? This excuses nobody. Nothing excuses barbarity. Understanding the roots of violence is not watering down responsibility. It is recognising that a society which feeds children on rage should not be shocked when some grow teeth.

Everyone found responsible must face swift, transparent and impartial justice. Not revenge. Not interference. Justice. The University of Jos and the relevant authorities must investigate thoroughly, strengthen preventive systems and protect every student. An institution’s greatness is defended by confronting its wounds honestly.

As we demand justice for Ibee, death whispers another question: Do you know who you are?

Yesterday, I overheard a man ask an elderly woman, “Do you know who I am?”

She answered in Hausa, without hesitation:

“Abincin gara.” Food for termites.

Scripture had already said it plainly: “For dust you are and to dust you will return” (Genesis 3:19).

That woman did not merely answer him. She conducted a one-sentence funeral for his ego.

We polish titles as though the grave has a protocol department. Honourable this. Distinguished that. Executive something. His Excellency. Convoys scream through traffic, sirens bullying citizens off the road, as though death will stand aside and say, “Apologies, Your Excellency, I did not recognise the number plate.”

Death is unimpressed by tinted windows.

It does not read complimentary cards, fear escorts or study bank balances. It has never been intimidated by a godfather, a bishop’s robe or a professor’s citations. Death needs no appointment and cannot be bribed.

This should terrify the corrupt, but many behave as though mortality is an opposition rumour.

They loot public money with the appetite of men packing lunch for eternity. They steal hospital funds, then fly abroad for treatment. They divert education budgets, then send their children to schools where laboratories have equipment and roofs do not leak. They steal from roads and later issue statements mourning citizens who died on those same roads. They attend funerals in long convoys, never suspecting that the coffin is giving a policy lecture.

Citizens are not innocent spectators. We condemn corruption until our cousin gets an appointment. We hate vote-buying but collect the rice. We curse impunity, then ask a powerful friend to “settle” a case. We film violence instead of stopping it. We watch suffering in high definition while conscience buffers.

At the heart of all this is novalepsis: the sudden, overwhelming realisation of how fragile everything in life is, filling you with both gratitude and a trembling vulnerability.

Novalepsis is what happens when someone you spoke with last week is suddenly spoken about in the past tense. It is seeing a chair and knowing its owner will not return. It is reaching for your phone, then remembering no network reaches where they have gone. The last joke does not announce itself. The final handshake does not glow. The last “see you tomorrow” carries no warning label.

Yet novalepsis is not only fear. It is gratitude stripped naked. It teaches us to hold people gently, apologise quickly, postpone less love and spend fewer years competing for applause from people who will eventually become Abincin gara beside us.

Philo, Tersoo and Ibee confront us with three different silences.

Philo’s silence asks whether we serve quietly or perform goodness for cameras.

Tersoo’s asks whether we love our families, laugh enough and show up for our people, even if Arsenal is involved.

Ibee’s silence screams. It asks whether we still believe every human life is sacred. It asks what kind of society raises a crowd capable of watching cruelty and calling it content. It asks whether justice will name the guilty, protect the innocent and resist the Nigerian magic trick in which outrage disappears when another scandal arrives.

Perhaps the consolation is that death does not have the final word.

For those of us who believe, the grave is not a full stop. It is a comma in a sentence God is still writing. We mourn because love has been wounded, but we hope because love is not buried with the body.

We can imagine Philo where quiet service is fully seen.

We can imagine Terso beyond pain, his beard carrying celestial dignity, perhaps discovering a heavenly football table where Arsenal finally stops testing its supporters’ faith.

We can entrust Ibee to a justice purer than ours, beyond mobs, cameras, influence and delay.

But heaven’s comfort must not become earth’s excuse.

We must grieve, and we must act. We must demand accountability. We must teach empathy before hatred becomes fluent. We must build homes where anger is disciplined, schools where dignity is protected, communities where rumours do not become death sentences, and institutions where justice does not depend on status.

Leaders must remember that every stolen naira has a human face: a child without a classroom, a mother without a hospital bed, a traveller on a deadly road, a young person abandoned to despair.

Corruption is not cleverness. It is violence with paperwork.

And all of us, leaders and led, rich and poor, famous and forgotten, must remember the old woman’s brutal wisdom.

“Do you know who I am?”

Yes.

A breath on loan.

A name temporarily carried.

A body returning to dust.

A soul accountable for what it did with power, pain, privilege and time.

Philo has gone ahead. Tersoo has gone ahead. Ibee was violently taken, but violence cannot erase his humanity or cancel the demand for justice. Their absence hurts because their presence mattered.

May their families find strength.

May their memories become lamps.

May their deaths make us kinder, braver and less impressed with ourselves.

Let the politician stealing tomorrow remember.

Let the citizen filming suffering remember.

Let the powerful person demanding recognition remember.

The termites are not interested in titles.

In the end, we are all Termite Diet (Abincin Gara)—May Nigeria win