The photograph released by Amnesty International Nigeria of Mary Talmon, one of the women shot dead during a protest in Adamawa, confronts our country with a tragedy that demands collective introspection, if not accountability. The organisation posted her image on its X handle while calling for an impartial investigation into what it described as the horrific use of excessive force by the military.
Her name symbolises a broader violence at the heart of state power. News reports offer conflicting figures. Some say seven women were killed. Others insist on eight or nine. The exact number remains disputed although the central truth stands firm. Defenceless women who invoked their constitutional freedom to assemble and speak were killed by armed soldiers in Lamorde Local Government Area on 8 December 2025. The lack of numerical certainty cannot dilute the moral gravity of the event. The killings echo a long and painful memory in Nigeria’s history.
In 1929, British colonial police shot and killed scores of women during Aba Women’s protests. Those women took a courageous stand against oppressive taxation and unjust rule. They demanded dignity and fairness from a colonial system that viewed them as subjects rather than citizens. The colonial government responded with bullets. Nearly a century has passed since 1929, although the gulf in time has not weakened the thread that binds the past to the present. A similar instinct persists within the state’s reflexive reliance on force when confronted with dissent. The French writer Jean Baptiste Alphonse Karr famously captured this paradox with clarity when he wrote, “The more things change, the more they remain the same”. “Plus les choses changent, plus elles restent les mêmes”.
Our country’s history presents an unbroken pattern that confirms this insight. The women of 1929 faced armed repression. The women of 2025 confronted the same logic. The protesters in Lamorde gathered to voice concerns over communal clashes that threatened their safety. Their protest sought state intervention and protection. They asked for peace. They demanded accountability. Their tools were words, bodies and solidarity. The military answered their calls with lethal gunfire. Such a response represents a profound inversion of purpose. State power should shield vulnerable communities. State power should support those who seek redress within lawful and peaceful means. State power should never turn its weapons against citizens who carry nothing but the weight of their fears and their desire for justice. When the machinery of force is unleashed against peaceful citizens, the social contract collapses. What remains is power stripped of legitimacy.
The constitutional right to assemble and freedom of expression lie at the foundation of democratic society. Hannah Arendt described freedom as the capacity to begin anew and to act in ways that bring new possibilities into the world. Citizens engage in this creative act whenever they speak against injustice or join together in collective protest. Any state that responds to such actions with violence rejects this democratic potential. The freedom Arendt emphasised becomes meaningless when those who speak must weigh the possibility of death. A state cannot claim democratic credentials when its first instinct toward protest is to silence rather than listen. State violence against protesters continues to weaken public trust in institutions that should represent and protect citizens.
Achille Mbembe offers a profound framework for understanding this descent through his concept of necropolitics, “the politics of death”. Mbembe argues that certain states organise power around the capacity to dictate who may live and who must die. This involves more than physical killing. It includes exposing specific groups to conditions where life becomes precarious and unsustainable. The women in Lamorde encountered this logic in its starkest form. They protested peacefully and were met with lethal force. Their deaths were not accidents. They were outcomes produced by a political order that continues to rely on violence as a method of governance. Mbembe’s argument deepens our understanding of the tragedy. He notes that modern states often treat marginalised communities as expendable. These communities exist in what he calls “death worlds”, zones where the state’s commitment to life becomes selective. The women of Lamorde lived in a region marked by communal conflict and insecurity. Instead of receiving robust protection, they encountered a state apparatus that met their vulnerability with indifference and force. Their deaths reflect a system where the distribution of security and dignity is unequal. Some lives receive the full protection of the state. Others are left exposed. The logic that allows soldiers to fire on peaceful women grows from this system of selective value.
Wole Soyinka’s prison memoir, The Man Died, returns with sharp relevance. Soyinka warned that the death of the man begins with the suppression of truth. When the state silences voices through violence and intimidation, the moral fabric of society frays. A nation cannot flourish where fear outweighs freedom. The tragedy in Adamawa mirrors the environment that informed Soyinka’s reflections. The violence that confronted peaceful women in Lamorde follows the familiar path of repression that earlier generations knew. The uniforms have changed. The rhetoric has softened. The instruments of violence remain in place. The human cost of the killings extends beyond the headlines. Families must bury loved ones whose only act was to speak. Communities must learn to live with the absence of women who represented courage, solidarity and resilience. Their protest demanded that the government protect life. Their deaths reveal a painful truth about the fragility of that protection. Our country cannot claim progress when women die for exercising rights enshrined in the Constitution. A true constitutional order grows from respect for rights and from the consistent application of justice. Guns turned against peaceful protesters reflect disorder, not strength. The military’s role in national defence remains critical. This role does not extend to policing peaceful protests. Democracies rely on trained civil police, transparent rules of engagement and accountable oversight. When soldiers replace these mechanisms, boundaries collapse and abuses flourish. The tragedy in Lamorde represents not only a violation of rights but also a distortion of our constitutional purpose.
Amnesty International’s demand for a transparent and independent investigation is not merely an institutional reflex; it is a constitutional imperative grounded in the state’s duty to protect life and secure accountability for its violation. The right to life in Section 33 of the Constitution is not couched in an aspirational language, it is a binding command on the state to refrain from unlawfully taking life while ineluctably establishing the culture in which state agents kill with impunity. When democracy loses the capacity to account for the blood spilled by its own security forces, it concedes moral authority. A credible investigation is therefore more than a procedural step; it is a test of whether Nigeria still aspires to constitutional government or has quietly surrendered to the normalisation of state-organised deaths. Accountability, in this sense, is not punishment alone; it is the architecture through which democratic legitimacy is renewed. Without accountability, institutions turn into self-serving bureaucracies insulated from oversight and indifferent to the citizens they exist to protect. The killing of unarmed women during a peaceful protest reveals, once again, how the distance between citizens and the state has widened into a chasm of fear. An unaccountable military becomes a killing machine rather than a constitutional instrument. Its failures, if unexamined, become dangerous precedents. Its abuses, if unpunished, become a doctrine. A democracy that tolerates this drift quietly teaches its security agencies that the Constitution ends where gun-a-blazing begins.
This is why constitutional language must be understood not as an ornamental text but as a living discipline imposed on power. The guarantees of freedom of assembly, dignity, and expression are not decorative provisions; they are structural safeguards meant to restrain the arbitrary force of the state. When peaceful women are shot for gathering, the Constitution is not merely violated, it is humiliated. It becomes evident that constitutional promises are not self-executing; they require institutions willing to enforce them, leaders willing to be bound by them, and citizens determined to insist that they matter. A state cannot claim fidelity to constitutional order while presiding over a security culture that treats public protest as a threat to be neutralised rather than a right to be protected.
The photograph of Mary Talmon thus becomes more than evidence of a crime; it is a moral and constitutional summon. It calls our country to confront the dissonance between the lofty ideals inscribed in itsconstitution and the lived experiences of its citizens. Her death, and the deaths of the women who stood beside her, forces a reckoning with what kind of country we desire Nigeria to become: one in which power is constrained by law and accountable to the people, or one in which violence by the state becomes a silent article of governance. Their memory demands truth; their courage insists on justice; their sacrifice challenges Nigeria to choose a future in which human life, dignity, and freedom are not theoretical aspirations but practiced commitments. Only then can the cycle of violence be broken, and only then can democracy claim to be worthy of its name.
May the blood of the women of Lamorde haunt the killers. Amen.