By Prince Charles Dickson
When Nigerians speak of insecurity, we often imagine the spectacular versions of violence: gunshots in the night, villages attacked, people displaced, lives abruptly shattered. But there is another violence that rarely makes the headlines because it does not always arrive with blood. It arrives with forms, queues, silence, indifference, hunger, delay, and exclusion.
It is the violence of systems that do not work for the people who need them most.
Some years ago in Jos, I met a woman at a public office who had come to resolve a simple administrative issue tied to access and documentation. Nothing dramatic. No court case. No police matter. Just a process that should have taken a short time. But she had already returned several times. Each visit meant transport fare she could barely afford, hours under the sun, lost income for the day, and the familiar humiliation of being told to “come back tomorrow.” Her face did not carry the panic of someone fleeing armed conflict. It carried something quieter and, in some ways, more devastating: exhaustion. A tired surrender to a system that had taught her that her time, dignity, and need did not matter.
We do not usually record that as violence.
But perhaps we should.
Because when a widow cannot access entitlements due to bureaucracy, when a young man with no connections is excluded from opportunity, when a person with disability is shut out by design, when poverty forces citizens into daily negotiations with hunger, transport, healthcare, and school fees, we are no longer dealing with mere inconvenience. We are looking at structural harm. And structural harm is violence by another name.
This is the kind of violence that does not explode. It accumulates.
It produces anger without event, trauma without witness, and insecurity without spectacle. It widens the distance between citizen and state. It teaches people that survival belongs to the connected, the wealthy, the male, the urban, the lucky. Over time, this kind of everyday insecurity erodes trust more quietly than conflict, but not less deeply.
The policy implication is clear: peacebuilding and security frameworks must expand their lens. If our analysis of violence only counts deaths, abductions, and physical attacks, we will continue to miss the slow violence of bad governance, exclusionary institutions, and economic abandonment. A security architecture that ignores bureaucratic cruelty and material deprivation is measuring only the smoke while ignoring the fire underneath.
For practitioners and donors, here is the uncomfortable question: Are we funding the management of visible crises while overlooking the ordinary systems that manufacture despair every day?
And perhaps the quieter provocation is this: maybe some communities are not only threatened by the violence that breaks in, but by the violence they line up for each morning and have learned to call normal.
Until we learn to count that too, our peace language will remain eloquent but incomplete.
