In today’s Nigeria, there aren’t many pathways to comfort or prosperity, only a million roads to death. From North to South and from East to West, Nigeria has become one vast killing field, a bitter contest between state and non-state actors. All that it took for 22-year-old Citizen Oluwabamise Ayanwole to die was to take a bus ride in Lagos on February 26. Between the Chevron bus-stop in Lekki and Oshodi on the mainland, she was cut down in cold blood, her body dumped on Carter Bridge.
Night dragged hapless Bamise to a harrowing end because, as the South African poet Oswald Mtshalli tells us: “Nightfall comes like /a dreaded disease/seeping through the pores/of a healthy body/and ravaging it beyond repair.” Precisely: beyond repair. Murderers bestride the length and breadth of this land making everyday a nightmare. At night: “A murderer’s hand, lurking in the shadows/ clasping the dagger,/strikes down the helpless victim.” Bus drivers are rapists working with ritualists, the occupiers of the lowest rung of Nigeria’s money magic (see Nigeria’s money magicians for details). And sunshine only serves to provide greater illumination to shed blood: Fulani herdsmen commit rape and murder, making billions from a populace abandoned by its government.
Our world is apparently at evening time and the children of night reign supreme: some 65 local vigilantes were killed by bandits (that is, terrorists) in border communities in Niger and Kebbi states this week. As we speak, no “uniform man” born of woman can boldly walk the streets of the South-East alone under the sun, even if armed. ESN murderers, fearing neither soldier nor detective, parade the streets dispensing death at will. They harvest the heads of traditional rulers, the lords of yesterday, with maniacal rapidity, turning beads to death passports. To tame the menace, the State sheds blood at will: per a document released in January titled Massacre in Eastern Nigeria: A Special Investigative Report and prepared by the International Society for Civil Liberties and Rule of Law (Intersociety), security agencies allegedly killed no fewer than 1,400 residents and razed about 1,000 homes in 100 Igbo communities in 14 months. The indicted agencies were the Nigeria Police Force, Department of State Services, Nigerian Air Force, Nigerian Navy and, of course, the Nigerian Army.
Beware the Ides of March: death lurks everywhere as the falcon cannot hear the falconer. The village head (Baale) of Olowe Gbagura in Ogun State, Chief Akin Muheedeen, has been burnt to death by yet-to-be-identified persons. It is not yet a month since the Olu of Agodo, Oba Ayinde Odetola, was similarly wasted in Ewekoro Local Council of the state. Gbanabom Hallowell, the Sierra Leonean poet, paints a gory picture of death and devastation in his poem The dining table, where “Dinner tonight comes with/gun wounds” and “our desert/tongues lick the vegetable blood- the pepper.” Hallowell speaks of “an island where guerrillas/walk the land while crocodiles surf.” Just how can travel be safe when, per Soyinka, “the road waits, famished”? There is a deluge of demons in this land if you pull through March, remember T.S Eliot: April is the cruelest month.
On the home front, this is no time to preach to any belligerent youth intent on painting the town red: the streets will be painted red with their blood by money ritualists, quicker than it takes to insult their parents. These are the days when murderers rent a room and live as presumed angels in a neighbourhood for six months, only to abduct babies and flee into the jungle where they came from, cutting up the little ones like Christmas chicken. If you dare to switch on your tape, the rascals in music want you to know that there’s plenty of lunacy on the streets, and ask whether you are “mad or something”. Nigerians, I say, are frozen in time: “Today for tomorrow/tomorrow becomes yesterday,” wrote the town crier, Christopher Okigbo, who during the 60s feared he would soon go to hell together with his iron bell. The hell Okigbo spoke of is now in Nigeria “live and direct”. If you switch on your cable subscription, you are confronted with Nollywood demonology: how to gain wealth through money ritual. And if you protest the antics of criminals in the neighbourhood, you will “collect” (that is, be beaten to stupor), and don’t even dare to “put mouth” in a man-and-wife palaver: a dagger meant for “the bastard” may be plunged deep into your throat. And those supposed to ferry you to hospital with dispatch will be busy uploading pictures.
Which brings me to the point of this essay: there is a linkage between the mindless violence across the country and the perverse leadership that holds the country in vice grip. At all levels of leadership, straw men hold the reins teaching the nation how to be hopeless and useless. Remember the warning issued to a sliding nation by Moses the prophet many centuries ago (Deuteronomy 28:67): “In the morning thou shalt say, Would God it were even! and at even thou shalt say, Would God it were morning! for the fear of thine heart wherewith thou shalt fear, and for the sight of thine eyes which thou shalt see.” Why would this be so? King Solomon the son of David tells us in Proverbs 29:2: “When the righteous are in authority, the people rejoice: but when the wicked beareth rule, the people mourn.” Yes, the people mourn and become frozen in time, wishing for day at night and for night during the day.
When governors ride bulldozers, pulling down political opponents’ homes with demonic excuses, what do you expect? When fish rots, it does so from the head. Our leaders opened the floodgates of hell by turning democracy into dictatorship. And the people took notice. When a president hunts down lawmakers, invades judges’ homes at midnight and “throws questioners to hyenas”, as Tanure Ojaide writes in The owl wakes us, what he is telling his people is that might is right. Everywhere, people behave like their leaders. Are you shocked?
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