My sister-in-law told my wife a story that is passionate and heartbreaking. The weight of it sat between them on the phone, too heavy to be held alone.
She was talking with her sister, who had just given birth, when the conversation drifted to the young doctor who had delivered the baby. He was someone they had grown close to because of the frequent visits to the private clinic back home. And it was in that ordinary chat that the slogan we all throw around, “may Nigeria not happen to you,” suddenly found flesh and blood.
The doctor had closed late, past 10pm. He was walking home, tired but relieved the night wasn’t long, holding onto his ID like a shield. A curfew had been imposed in the town recently because of hoodlums. The streets were empty. Bad boys stopped him. They took everything. His money, his phone, and then, cruelly, his ID card. They stripped off his shirt and trousers too, leaving him in just a boxer and a singlet. Yes, even the clothes.
That should have been the end of the nightmare. It was only the beginning. As he walked on, half-naked and shaking, he ran into police officers enforcing the curfew. They saw a man with no clothes, no ID, wandering in the dark, and their minds made up the story for them. “Drug addict. Bandit.” He shouted, “No, I was robbed! I’m a medical doctor!” But the more he explained, the angrier they got. “How can a doctor look like this? Where is your ID? They robbed your clothes too?” The beating started. He screamed, hoping someone would hear.
And then, as if the universe wanted to add a twist only fiction dares, a soldiers’ patrol van slowed down, didn’t stop, and seemed to urge the police on: “kill him, he’s a criminal.” His leg was broken. The healer became the patient.
At that exact moment, back in the clinic, his phone was ringing nonstop. A new patient had come in, a woman in labour. They needed him urgently. The phone rang and rang in the hands of his robbers while the man who owned it lay bleeding on the street.
My wife finished the story and looked at me. We both went quiet. There was nothing to add, only the heaviness of it.
I broke the silence. “The police used logic,” I said. “But it was the kind of logic that refuses to doubt itself. A man without clothes at 10pm? Without an ID? During curfew? To them, that evidence was enough. Why would robbers take clothes and an ID? Therefore he must be lying. Therefore he must be the criminal.”
This is what psychologists call the “fundamental attribution error,” a term coined by Lee Ross. We overestimate personality and underestimate situation. We see an outcome and invent a character to match it. We also fall into “confirmation bias”; once we decide someone looks like a suspect, every new detail only proves us right. The brain hates uncertainty, so it closes the case early.
The problem is, human life doesn’t always fit the logic we use to judge it. Not everything makes sense from a distance. Not everything can be explained so others will believe you. Sometimes you are robbed of your story before you can even tell it.
Philosopher Karl Popper warned that no amount of reasoning can replace observation. In law, we call it “audi alteram partem”. Meaning, hear the other side. But in the street, in moments of fear, we trade due process for speed. We trade humility for certainty. And that certainty can turn us hard.
That is how coincidence becomes verdict. How appearance becomes evidence. How luck decides who is called a saint and who is called a villain. The same logic that saves one man can condemn another, depending on timing, lighting, and who is watching. Even courts, with all their procedures, get it wrong sometimes. The same facts, the same evidence, can be interpreted differently by different judges because they are human, and humans are not cameras. We interpret.
I thought of Mokwa last year. In late May, heavy rain came down and the town was swallowed in hours. Nearly a thousand people died. Hundreds are still missing. Houses, roads, gone like a scene cut from a film. Till today, people try to explain it with drainage, with deforestation, with a dam. Those are real factors. But they don’t fully contain the mystery of water arriving all at once, with that kind of force. When we insist that everything must add up, we invent neat narratives just to sleep at night. Sometimes the honest answer is: we weren’t there, and we don’t know the whole truth.
It happens in small ways too. A friend once dragged me to the bathroom at 2am in our old apartment. “I saw something,” he whispered. “Like a man. I’m sure.” I couldn’t explain it. I told him some things don’t add up, and you have to let them be. Another friend got arrested years ago. Overnight, stories started multiplying. “We always knew he was like that.” The old me remembered him as a good boy. What changed? I don’t know. But I’ve learned that logic without curiosity becomes a weapon.
If those police officers had paused, if they had let doubt sit in the room for just a minute, that doctor would have gotten help instead of a beating. The charge to “take out any bandit at sight” is convenient. It feels like justice. But convenience is not truth.
The truth is, we cannot know everything. We should be modest enough to say that. We should be curious before we are judgmental. Logic is a tool, not a god. Without evidence, without listening, without the humility to admit we might be wrong, it will keep breaking the very people it was meant to protect.
So yes, may Nigeria not happen to you. And may we, when it does, have the restraint not to finish the story before the person gets to speak.
Bagudu can be reached via bagudumohammed15197@gmail.com or 07034943575.
