By: Comrade Kunle Sodipo anipr
kdrexafricanchild@gmail.com
16 July, 2026
Many innocent lives have paid the ultimate price for Nigeria.
Not in boardrooms. Not in campaign rallies. But on battlefields, highways, forests, and classrooms.
Citizens who woke up to farm, to trade, to teach, to serve.
Security agents who wore the uniform knowing they may never return home to their families.
Our country is bleeding. And the blood on the ground is both internal and external. Local observers, foreign analysts, and security experts agree: the factors ravaging us are complex. But the cost is simple and human. Lives. Futures. Dreams.
Yet here is what disturbs me most: *We forget.*
We forget quickly. Too quickly.
We bury our dead with tears today, and with silence tomorrow.
We have no national roll of honor for the policeman shot in Benue.
No monument for the soldier who died clearing an ambush in Borno.
No school named after the NSCDC officer who died shielding school children in Oyo.
No national reward for the families of the vigilante who paid with his life so a community could sleep.
Instead, what do we do?
We roll out red carpets.
We confer national honors, name stadiums, airports, and expressways — mostly after political allies, financiers, and men and women whose greatest sacrifice was to a party, not to the nation.
I ask: When did loyalty to the state become less honorable than loyalty to power?
A nation that does not immortalize its sacrificial citizens is a nation that tells its living that sacrifice is worthless.
A country that names monuments after the comfortable, while ignoring the courageous, is a country teaching its youth the wrong values.
This is not about politics. This is about memory. About gratitude. About national character.
*What must we do?*
1. *A National Wall of Heroes*: A physical and digital monument in Abuja listing every security agent and civilian who died in service to Nigeria from 1999 till date. Names. Faces. Stories.
2. *Immortalize in Infrastructure*: Let schools, clinics, barracks, and roads bear the names of our fallen patriots, not just those who funded campaigns.
3. *National Day of Remembrance*: One day every year dedicated to honoring all Nigerians who died in the line of duty — military, police, DSS, civil defense, and innocent civilians.
4. *Welfare for Families*: Honor is not just in naming. It is in pensions paid, in children schooled, in widows cared for.
The late patriots cannot speak for themselves anymore.
But we who are alive owe them memory. We owe them honor. We owe them justice.
If we continue to celebrate convenience over courage, we will raise a generation that asks: “Why should I die for a country that will forget me in 6 months?”
Nigeria, we can do better.
Let us stop giving honor to convenience and start giving honor to sacrifice.
Because the true foundation of any great nation is not built by politicians alone.
*It is built, and watered, by the blood of patriots.*
May the souls of all our fallen heroes rest in peace.
And may we, the living, finally learn to remember.
Feedback: kdrexafricanchild@gmail.com
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