One of the clearest indicators of a failed state is the normalisation of genocidal rhetoric without consequences. When individuals can make public statements that may constitute direct and public incitement to genocide, and the state responds with silence or indifference, it raises serious questions about the credibility of its institutions and the equal protection of its citizens. When confronted with issues like this, our responsibility as a people is not to obsess over peripheral figures like Opeyemi and Obi Cubana. We must interrogate the deeper structural problem: Why do some people feel sufficiently emboldened to make inflammatory and potentially genocidal statements about the Igbo with little apparent fear of accountability? What historical prejudices, institutional failures, and political incentives have made such rhetoric socially tolerable? More importantly, Nigerians must understand that scapegoating the Igbo has never resolved Nigeria’s fundamental problems. Yakubu Gowon’s era offers a sobering historical lesson. The mass killing of Igbo people and the destruction wrought by the Nigerian Civil War did not resolve the underlying political and ethnic tensions that plagued the country. Neither did the war magically eliminate Nigeria’s economic challenges or establish a lasting foundation for national cohesion. A nation does not solve its problems by persecuting an ethnic group; it merely compounds its failures by giving prejudice the appearance of public policy. Until Nigeria confronts the institutional weaknesses, historical grievances, and culture of impunity that enable ethnic hatred to flourish, it will continue to mistake the persecution of a people for the resolution of a problem. Blaming the Igbo is not a solution to Nigeria’s problems. It is a convenient distraction from the people and institutions responsible for solving them.