Some time ago, the news broke that six-year-old twin boys were kidnapped by the very security guard trusted to watch over them in the Brighter area of Minna, Niger State. What turned the story into a wildfire of grief and disbelief was the detail that broke everyone’s heart: the guard used the same motorcycle his employer had bought for him to carry out the crime. During the last Sallah period, Eid Kabir, while the father was away, he pretended he was taking the children out to celebrate in town.
The father, a businessman named Danjuma, only realized something was wrong when he could not find Anas and Umar, and discovered that the guard, Sani Abdulrahman, was also missing. It happened in June 2026, and the outrage was immediate. How could a man who had been shown favor, even gifted a motorcycle, betray that trust? The reported release of the boys more than two months later, after ransom was allegedly paid, is what has stayed with me and forced this reflection.
Sociologists call this the problem of the “just-world hypothesis”. Our deep human need to believe that good deeds are rewarded and bad deeds punished. Psychologist Melvin Lerner argued that we cling to this illusion because it makes life feel safe and predictable. But real life is not a Nollywood script where the villain always falls and the kind man always wins. Sometimes the arithmetic breaks.
If neat arithmetic governed life, then a man who is kind, generous, and helpful should be shielded by some invisible hand of God. But it is not so. In fact, sometimes it is the very goodness in people that exposes them. I once heard of a lady in Kaduna who spent her days donating clothes, feeding orphans, and walking into troubled places to help. She was kidnapped. I asked myself: in what moral equation does compassion become a risk factor? Yet that is life.
And let us not pretend that prayer is the monopoly of the righteous. Even criminals pray, and often with more desperation. Theologian Reinhold Niebuhr once noted that men in peril bargain with God more fiercely than men in comfort. A pastor who kneels every morning and an armed robber who kneels every night may both be asking for protection. That alone makes life impossible to reduce to simple addition: 1 + 1 = blessing.
This unpredictability is what makes us uncomfortable with God and with life. We want to explain suffering. When a cleric dies young and a former president lives into his 80s, we scramble for reasons. Shehu Shagari, Muhammadu Buhari, Yakubu Gowon, Olusegun Obasanjo, Ibrahim Babangida, Abdulsalami Abubakar , all reached or are reaching advanced age despite the weight of criticism and power.
Meanwhile, men of prayer and service leave too soon. It does not fit our moral formula, and so we invent one.
That is why the reaction of a WhatsApp user, MJ Baby, to Daily Post Nigeria’s report on 18th July 2026 struck me. After former Big Brother Naija season 4 winner Mercy Eke confessed she sometimes regrets the show because it complicated her search for a sincere partner, MJ Baby wrote:
“Hmmm! There are so many ladies who didn’t participate in BBN that are successful but still find it difficult to find sincere spouses. Mercy Eke drives a Lambo, certainly she wouldn’t want to date a person who drives Toyota. I feel like it’s the irony of life.”
My reply to MJ Baby came from the same place of bewilderment and acceptance:
“Your perspective carries a unique blend of sarcasm and insight. I completely agree with you. On the other hand, conscience has a way of passing judgment on us. I once read the story of a woman who, after lamenting the hardships of her second marriage, concluded that she was simply paying for the wrongs she had done to her first husband. No one told her that. It was the verdict of her own conscience. Whatever those wrongs were, she knew them better than anyone. That is why we must first clear our conscience before we can claim to understand God’s plans for people’s lives and destinies. Cheers, and God bless.”
Which brings us to the harder question: if God’s ways are not our ways, if His justice does not follow our timelines, where did we get the arrogance to judge one another so easily? We love to say a man was kidnapped because he was a womanizer. That sickness came because of sin. That failure came because he stopped going to mosque or church. But research in psychology shows this is “attributional bias”.We assign causes to other people’s misfortune to protect ourselves from the fear that it could happen to us too.
The truth is, life balances itself in ways we cannot see. You can prepare for an exam with all your heart and still fail, then pass another you barely studied for. You can beg ten relatives for school fees and be insulted, only for a stranger you’ve never met to pay it in full and disappear. Philosopher Albert Camus called this the absurd, the gap between our hunger for meaning and the silence of the world. Yet within that absurdity, grace shows up.
So is life unfair because it does not give judgment on our terms? Perhaps not. The God we serve is not to be blamed for refusing to dance to our arithmetic. Justice comes, but not always as spectacle.
At the end, the greatest reward of staying good is not immunity from pain. It is peace. It is the quiet confidence that you are not being hunted by your own conscience. That was Danjuma’s consolation, the businessman whose kindness to a guard cost him his sons for two months. The biggest pay for goodness is not that tragedy will never come. It is that when it does, you can face it without the added burden of guilt. Unlike the woman who believed she was paying for sins against her first husband, the good man can say: I did not invite this.
Goodness does pay. But the currency is not always protection. Sometimes it is clarity, courage, and the right state of mind to endure what life throws at you. And that, in a world that refuses to add up, may be the most thrilling miracle of all.
Bagudu Mohammed is the Founder, Alternative Perspectives.
Web: http://alternativeperspective.onrender.com
Email: bagudumohammed15197@gmail.com | Phone: 0703 494 3575
