In recent weeks, the digital streets have not known peace. “Justice for Maryam Usman, the murdered Kogi school teacher” has refused to leave our timelines. It trends, it aches, it lingers. And behind the hashtags is a story so ordinary in its beginning and so catastrophic in its end that it forces the soul to pause.
Maryam Usman’s story wakes something in you. It is sad, heartbreaking, and above all, avoidable. As I sat with it, one idea kept returning to me: the theory of conflict escalation. Scholars like Louis Kriesberg and Morton Deutsch have long argued that most conflicts do not begin as wars. They begin as sparks. Small, dismissible, even laughable. But when emotions are left unchecked, when restraint is traded for ego, those sparks are mismanaged until they become wildfire. That is exactly what “from nothing to something” feels like in real life.
I still remember a comment I saw once on a group platform. Two people were “catching cruise,” bantering, and before anyone could trace how it started, words turned to blows. The netizen captured it in four words that have haunted me since: “from nothing to something.” It was brilliant because it was true. Most crises, quarrels, even communal wars do not announce themselves with trumpets. They creep in wearing jokes.
Life keeps vindicating that phrase. A friend once told me about a man who came to him fuming. His house had been burgled, and ₦20,000 was stolen. Broke and furious, the man said he had just returned from a native doctor. He swore an oath: whoever took the money must die within seven days, or he would sell everything he owned to fund the vengeance. My friend looked at him and asked one quiet question that has stayed with me for years: “You are complaining of a loss you cannot afford, and yet you want to spend more to chase vengeance.
How does that bring the money back?” The native doctor had quoted ₦10,000, plus animals, for the rituals. In trying to recover ₦20,000, the man was willing to lose ₦30,000 and his peace. That is the psychology of escalation: pain demands payment, and ego refuses to let it go, even when the cost multiplies.
The case of Maryam Usman fits this frame with chilling precision. From “nothing to something.” From a disciplinary action to a funeral. From a moment of correction to a lifetime of consequence.
According to The Guardian of July 8, 2026, the Kogi State Police Command arrested three suspects in connection with her death. Maryam Usman, a 30-year-old teacher at Brains Minds Nursery and Primary School, Ugbamaka in Olamaboro LGA, died on June 25 after allegedly sustaining injuries from separate assaults. The police said the trouble began on June 17 when Abdullahi Isiaka allegedly attacked her at her residence over discipline meted to his 11-year-old son.
Later that day, Ramatu Isiaka Eleojo allegedly attacked her on her way to prayers. The next day, Ojonojima Mary, Ramatu’s younger sister, allegedly stormed the school and assaulted her at work. She was first treated at Grace Clinic, Ugbamaka, then referred to Eleojo Clinic, Okpo, where she died. The Command said a prima facie case of criminal conspiracy and culpable homicide had been established. CP Naziru Bello Kankarofi commended the detectives and urged residents to avoid jungle justice and seek lawful resolution.
Read that again and feel the weight. From disciplining a child to the cost of taking a life. From the right to be angry to the crime of homicide. From a manageable problem to a problem that can never be managed again. From the pain of a cane to the pain of a grave. From protecting a child to orphaning that same child, because what school fees will be paid now, what future will not be bruised by this absence? What did the assault solve? Did it erase the discipline? Did it heal the child? Social psychologist Brad Bushman’s research on retaliatory aggression tells us what happens when anger is not regulated: people act to restore pride, not to solve problems. And in that moment, “nothing” becomes “something” that cannot be undone.
And yet, I find it hard to meet this tragedy with only rage. Not because the act is excusable. It is not. But because criminologists and behavioral scientists keep reminding us that many violent acts are not born from premeditated evil. They are born from unchecked emotion, wounded ego, and the illusion of control. Aristotle called it akrasia, acting against one’s better judgment because passion overruns reason.
Daniel Goleman, in his work on emotional intelligence, warned that without the ability to name and manage emotion, even love can become lethal. A man who beats his wife to death, as reported just days ago in Nasarawa, may not hate her. He may believe he is correcting her. But correction without restraint becomes catastrophe.
That is my greatest fear about coincidence. You curse a thief, and someone dies the next week. People will connect dots that were never meant to meet. You raise your hand to “teach a lesson,” and the lesson becomes a life sentence. The Yoruba have a proverb: “Bí inú bàjẹ́, ọwọ́ á bàjẹ́,” meaning, when the heart is spoiled, the hand will spoil things.
Maryam’s death asks us a hard question: what do we gain when we refuse to let “nothing” remain “nothing”? Vengeance feels like justice in the moment, but research in restorative justice shows it rarely restores anything. It only adds loss to loss. The teacher is gone. The child has lost a teacher and, in a way, a parent to the law. The suspects have lost their freedom. A community has lost trust. All because a moment was not held in check.
May God grant us strength against provocation. May we learn, before it is too late, that the best defense of those we love is not our anger, but our ability to govern it. Because “from nothing to something” is not just a phrase. It is a warning. And Maryam Usman paid the price for a world that ignored it.
Bagudu can be reached via bagudumohammed15197@gmail.com or 07034943575
