EDITORIAL — When People Lose Confidence, Rumours Become a Refuge

The spread of a coup rumour is not merely a political disturbance; it is an emotional x-ray of a wounded society. People do not cling to such whispers because they love chaos. They cling to them when they can no longer recognise themselves in the life the state offers.

Behind every viral rumour there is a human situation: parents unable to afford bread that was cheap six months ago; graduates pacing the city with folders of unanswered applications; farmers who plant in fear because the road back from the farm is a lottery of death; families that bury children killed by stray bullets or bandits without any hope of justice; civil servants watching their salaries dissolve to dust before mid-month; traders closing shops because the cost of restocking is insane. A country cannot soak in this much accumulated hurt without psychic consequences.

So when the Federal Government and the Defence Headquarters denounce the coup rumour as “baseless and dangerous,” they are correct on the surface. A coup would crush rights, distort destinies, and throw the nation back into the iron cage of decrees. But a society constantly exhausted by hunger, fear and neglect sometimes reaches for any story even a terrible one that suggests the present order might not be permanent.

That is the real danger: a population that stops believing that change is possible without force.

The work before the government is therefore not just to control information, but to heal despair. People retreat to rumours when they no longer feel held by their country, when the state becomes a faraway thing that issues statements but not comfort, directives but not dignity.

Human life is not abstract. Inflation is not a headline; it is a mother skipping meals so a child can eat. Insecurity is not a statistic; it is a driver who prays louder than he sings. Corruption is not a scandal; it is a hospital without oxygen. Policy failure lands on bodies, not papers.

This is why the only lasting cure for coup rumours is not condemnation, not arrests, not surveillance — but mercy in policy, honesty in speech, courage in reform, and a visible shift that tells ordinary people: your life matters again.

Democracy is not defended by stone walls but by human trust. When people find reasons to hope inside civilian rule, the rumour of soldiers will die on its own.

The Republic will be safe the day its citizens stop scanning the horizon for rescue — because they finally feel protected at home.