A few days ago, I was driving home with my family when something happened that has stayed on my mind ever since. Out of nowhere, a stone struck the back door of my car with a loud impact that instantly changed the mood in the vehicle. My first instinct was to stop and find out what had happened, because the damage sounded serious and I needed to understand the source of it.
My wife, however, advised that we should just continue driving. She had noticed some okada riders fighting nearby and suspected that the stone might have come from that chaos. In truth, her suggestion made perfect sense in that moment. It would have been easier, safer even, to ignore it and move on with our journey. But something in me resisted that idea, maybe anger, maybe curiosity, or simply the shock of what had just happened.
So I turned back.
When I arrived at the scene, I discovered that one of the young men involved in the fight had thrown the stone, and the damage to my car was obvious. The rear door had a deep dent, the kind that you don’t just overlook. I called him forward and asked him to come and see what he had done. He was a young okada rider, and from Northern Nigeria. In that moment, the situation was still simple in my mind, just damage, responsibility, and consequences.
But everything shifted the moment people gathered around us.
The young man immediately went on his knees, begging for forgiveness repeatedly, his voice shaking with fear and regret. Around us, people began to speak at once. Some advised me to forgive him, while others insisted that I should not let it go easily. At first, it sounded like normal public reaction, but as I stood there listening, I began to notice something deeper and more unsettling. The opinions were not just divided, they were quietly aligning along familiar lines that reflected something bigger than the incident itself.
In that moment, I realized that what should have remained a simple roadside accident was slowly turning into something else entirely. The focus was no longer the stone, or even the damage it caused, but identity, perception, and division. It was no longer about what happened, but about who was involved.
That was when it hit me: the stone damaged my car, but something deeper was already damaged in us long before that moment.
Standing there, watching a young man on his knees pleading for mercy, I felt a shift within me. I had a choice to make, whether to allow anger and pressure from the crowd to define my response, or to treat the moment for what it truly was, a mistake that could either end in bitterness or forgiveness. So I chose to forgive him. Not because the damage did not matter, because it did, but because I realized that holding on to anger in that moment would not repair anything, it would only deepen something already broken in a different way.
After I left, I could not stop thinking about what had happened. Because what I witnessed was not just about a stone hitting a car, it felt like a small reflection of a much larger issue within our society. We are slowly becoming people who interpret everything through the lens of division. Before we understand what happened, we often ask who is involved. Before we see the person, we see the label. North or South, religion or tribe, and in that process, we lose sight of something very important.
The truth is that most people are not as different as we assume. Everyone is struggling in their own way. A young man riding an okada in one part of the country is facing the same pressures of survival as another person hustling in a different region. A mother trying to feed her children in one state is carrying the same weight as another mother elsewhere. Different locations, same human struggle. The details may differ, but the emotions are often the same.
One of my lecturers once joked that only two things truly unite Nigerians: football and corruption. It used to sound funny when we heard it in school, but the older I get, the more I understand why it resonates with people. That lecturer is Professor Adelakun. During football matches, we forget our differences for a moment and celebrate as one. But outside those moments, the divisions quickly return, sometimes even stronger than before.
What stayed with me most from that day was not the dent in my car, but the realization of how fragile our sense of unity has become. How quickly we move from seeing one another as human beings to seeing one another through the filter of identity.
And maybe the real question we need to ask ourselves is not about that stone anymore, but about how many times we have thrown invisible stones at each other without even realizing it.
Because once we stop seeing each other as human beings first, everything else becomes easier to break, and much harder to fix.
