Nigerians are in a Gulf war zone. Nigeria has no consulate to call.

If you have family working in Iran, Qatar, or the UAE right now, here's what the Nigerian government officially knows about how many Nigerians are in the conflict zone: nothing.

NiDCOM confirmed this week it has received zero distress calls from Nigerians in Iran. Then came the line that should stop you cold. Nigeria has no embassy in Iran. The Commission doesn't have data on how many Nigerians are there. "We don't have embassies there. The only person controlling embassies is the Minister of Foreign Affairs."

Flights across the Gulf are grounded. Emirates suspended operations from Dubai. Bombs are landing. And the Nigerian government's honest answer, when asked how many of its citizens are caught in this, is: we're monitoring.

Now compare this to Tuesday morning. The NCPC knew exactly how many pilgrims were in Israel. Their flight schedules, their return dates, their names. It coordinated their extraction. 500 people came home safely. The state moved efficiently because those people were inside a government programme — registered, tracked, accounted for.

Informal workers in Qatar and the UAE, students, people who got there on their own — they don't exist in the government's systems. So when the bombing starts, the government's answer is a referral to a ministry that also doesn't have an embassy there.

Nigeria's diaspora is enormous. Nigeria's consular infrastructure is not. That gap has always existed. A war just made it impossible to ignore.