Writing on faith, justice, and public life in Nigeria.https://gershomumar.com/en-gbhttps://gershomumar.com/essays/why-it-is-overly-simplistic-to-call-the-non-linear-war-a-farmer-herder-conflict/https://gershomumar.com/essays/why-it-is-overly-simplistic-to-call-the-non-linear-war-a-farmer-herder-conflict/The Middle Belt's violence is misnamed. An argument that 'farmer-herder conflict' is a convenient label for something closer to a non-linear war fought behind ethnic and religious cover.Wed, 06 May 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://gershomumar.com/essays/how-to-count-your-blessings/https://gershomumar.com/essays/how-to-count-your-blessings/Gratitude is hard because pride resists it. On introspection, humility, and perspective — with Mandela, Washington, and Oprah — as the three ways to actually count your blessings.Tue, 20 May 2025 00:00:00 GMThttps://gershomumar.com/essays/what-i-wish-i-knew-about-grace/https://gershomumar.com/essays/what-i-wish-i-knew-about-grace/My father, a razor blade, and the servant who forgave him before handing it over — the story that taught him, and later me, what grace actually is.Fri, 04 Apr 2025 00:00:00 GMThttps://gershomumar.com/essays/where-conscience-goes-to-die/https://gershomumar.com/essays/where-conscience-goes-to-die/A driver refuses a bribe at a northern checkpoint and has a rifle pointed at our windscreen. It was the man beside me who unsettled me more.Mon, 17 Mar 2025 00:00:00 GMThttps://gershomumar.com/essays/change-the-good-the-bad-and-the-ugly/https://gershomumar.com/essays/change-the-good-the-bad-and-the-ugly/From the first gun fired to EndSARS to the UK's borders, an argument that change is neither good nor bad in itself — only in what we choose to make of it.Mon, 27 Jan 2025 00:00:00 GMThttps://gershomumar.com/essays/this-rosey-flowery-thing-called-love/https://gershomumar.com/essays/this-rosey-flowery-thing-called-love/Sitting with a widower's love story, a search for what love actually is — not feeling or romance but being truly known, which begins with knowing yourself.Thu, 08 Aug 2024 00:00:00 GMThttps://gershomumar.com/essays/you-cannot-summarize-a-revolution/https://gershomumar.com/essays/you-cannot-summarize-a-revolution/From the Arab Spring to EndSARS to the 2023 election, political change follows a pattern the establishment never sees coming — until it is too late.Tue, 02 May 2023 00:00:00 GMThttps://gershomumar.com/essays/how-to-give-up/https://gershomumar.com/essays/how-to-give-up/A straight-faced, mock-instructional guide to quitting — despondency, doomsday, the ethics of it — that teaches you the method over two thousand words and then declines to use it.Fri, 19 Aug 2022 00:00:00 GMThttps://gershomumar.com/essays/the-endsars-protest-lessons-on-effective-governance/https://gershomumar.com/essays/the-endsars-protest-lessons-on-effective-governance/The lessons EndSARS left behind: the chasm between the governed and their government, the young women who ran what the state claimed it couldn't, and the making of martyrs.Thu, 02 Sep 2021 00:00:00 GMThttps://gershomumar.com/essays/practicing-dying-for-the-final-showdown/https://gershomumar.com/essays/practicing-dying-for-the-final-showdown/At my father's hospital bedside — where the dying man comforted his visitors — a meditation on death, the fear of the unknown, and the smaller deaths we rehearse every day.Sun, 22 Aug 2021 00:00:00 GMThttps://gershomumar.com/essays/the-accident-of-our-justice-system/https://gershomumar.com/essays/the-accident-of-our-justice-system/A road accident I did not cause lands me on the floor of a police cell with nine boys held for a week without charge — and a hard look at Nigerian justice.Wed, 24 Feb 2021 00:00:00 GMThttps://gershomumar.com/essays/the-small-guys-in-business-deserve-our-admiration/https://gershomumar.com/essays/the-small-guys-in-business-deserve-our-admiration/A letter to the small business owner — on consistency, self-motivation, and the quiet heroism of surviving Nigeria's three-year odds without funding or fanfare.Sat, 30 Jan 2021 00:00:00 GMThttps://gershomumar.com/essays/we-the-people/https://gershomumar.com/essays/we-the-people/From Venezuela to Hong Kong to EndSARS — on the phrase 'we the people,' and how governments everywhere have come to read it as something other than the promise it was.Thu, 22 Oct 2020 00:00:00 GMThttps://gershomumar.com/essays/who-is-corrupt/https://gershomumar.com/essays/who-is-corrupt/My father, a theologian, defined corruption as missing the mark a thing was made for. By that measure, the question isn't who is corrupt — it's who isn't.Mon, 14 Sep 2020 00:00:00 GMThttps://gershomumar.com/essays/trumpism-is-an-interruption-to-americas-greatness/https://gershomumar.com/essays/trumpism-is-an-interruption-to-americas-greatness/Written in July 2020: a foreign admirer of the American ideal — Wilson, Hoover, JFK, Obama — on why Trump reads as an interruption to it, not a restoration.Fri, 31 Jul 2020 00:00:00 GMThttps://gershomumar.com/essays/i-would-pick-consistency-over-talent-any-day/https://gershomumar.com/essays/i-would-pick-consistency-over-talent-any-day/A 0–5 schoolboy football defeat taught me the lesson: talent seduces, but consistency wins. Why the disciplined, unremarkable grinder beats the gifted almost every time.Sat, 18 Jul 2020 00:00:00 GMThttps://gershomumar.com/essays/writing-is-art/https://gershomumar.com/essays/writing-is-art/On falling in love with books, then fearing the blank page — and the reason to keep writing anyway: writers are the unsung witnesses who carry a civilization's stories forward.Mon, 06 Jul 2020 00:00:00 GMThttps://gershomumar.com/essays/what-it-means-to-be-a-graduate-in-a-third-world-country/https://gershomumar.com/essays/what-it-means-to-be-a-graduate-in-a-third-world-country/Graduation is euphoric, then the labor market is not. On what a degree actually means in a third world country — and the system built against the young people who earn one.Fri, 03 Jul 2020 00:00:00 GMThttps://gershomumar.com/essays/why-america-needs-more-tolerance-not-more-love/https://gershomumar.com/essays/why-america-needs-more-tolerance-not-more-love/After George Floyd: an argument that love, however potent, cannot end racial conflict at scale — and that tolerance, which asks less and delivers more, is the skill America actually needs.Sun, 21 Jun 2020 00:00:00 GMThttps://gershomumar.com/essays/the-thing-about-being-a-man/https://gershomumar.com/essays/the-thing-about-being-a-man/Becoming a man isn't decided by age. Against the cult of the tough, unfeeling exterior, an argument that real strength includes vulnerability, empathy, and the courage to feel.Sat, 13 Jun 2020 00:00:00 GMThttps://gershomumar.com/essays/bridging-racial-gaps-through-food/https://gershomumar.com/essays/bridging-racial-gaps-through-food/A Nigerian who will eat anything asks a simple question: how do you enjoy a people's food and still hate the people? On food as an unlikely bridge across race.Sat, 06 Jun 2020 00:00:00 GMT