Palm Sunday in Jos. Again. The state's response follows the same script it always does.

The governor arrived in an armoured tank.

That detail matters. Not because it's unusual in Nigeria. Because of what it says about who the state was protecting when it drove into Angwan Rukuba on Monday morning.

On Sunday evening, 29 March, gunmen on motorcycles entered a busy market junction in Jos North and opened fire. Indiscriminately. At around 8pm, while people were going about their evening. The police confirmed 14 deaths. Community leaders put the number at 27. The gap between those two figures is not a clerical error. It's the state deciding how big it will allow this to look.

Governor Caleb Mutfwang visited the scene the next day. The government imposed a 48-hour curfew. The CAN said Nigeria cannot keep bleeding like this. Hundreds of residents defied the curfew to protest in the streets.

The attackers came on motorcycles. They left the same way. No group has claimed responsibility.

They didn't need to. Last year's Palm Sunday attack in the same region killed 54 Christians in Zikke village. The year before that, four people died in Bokkos on Easter Monday. 2022, 2021, 2020. Every year. Same period. Same geography. The International Christian Concern has documented the pattern across multiple years. Easter week in the Middle Belt has become a predictable season of organised violence.

The state knows this. Every governor of Plateau state in the last decade has known this. Every security briefing in Abuja has flagged the Middle Belt as a persistent crisis zone. And every year, the response follows the same script.

The mechanism is not incompetence. That would be easier to fix. This security architecture is not failing to stop these attacks. It is functioning in a way where stopping them is not the primary outcome. A visit. A curfew. A condemnation. A promise of pursuit. Then quiet, until the next season. The state has optimised for managing these events, not ending them.

A curfew punishes the community that was just attacked. It restricts movement for the people trying to grieve, bury their dead, and get to hospital. It gives the security agencies the space they need. What it doesn't do is alter the conditions that brought the gunmen in the first place.

The uncomfortable protagonist here is the Nigerian state at every level. Mutfwang inherited this problem. He did not create Palm Sunday violence in Plateau state. But he also visited the community in an armoured tank, which means the first question in the governor's security briefing was not "how do we protect these people" but "how do we protect the governor in this community."

The federal government declared a national security emergency in November 2025 and announced thousands of new security recruits. Plateau state has had military deployments for years. The Middle Belt, particularly Benue and Plateau state, continues to experience eight violent attacks per day on average according to conflict monitoring data. That number is not before the deployments. That number is after them.

The person paying for this isn't the governor in the armoured tank. It's the family in Angwan Rukuba who buried someone on Palm Sunday and will be asked to bury someone again next year if nothing structural changes. It's the resident who said to a journalist: "People are outside because of the attack that happened yesterday. They chased the security men because they are not doing any help right here."

That resident isn't wrong. The security men were there. They are always there. And the attacks keep happening on schedule.

The question isn't whether the Nigerian state takes Plateau state seriously. It's whether taking it seriously means announcing operations, deploying forces, and giving press conferences, or whether it means the thing none of those announcements have yet produced. Safety. For the people who live there. On Palm Sunday.

The state says things are under control. The market says something else.