How can people be continually butchered in a land that has both king and chief?

Mo ti ba won de Liberia ri k’ogun o to de. Bi Ilu America n’ilu won jo o. Igba t’ogun wolu, Ilu won d’ahoro, Omo ilu Liberia, won fee ku tan o. Gbogbo oro aje won lo pare loju won.” (Gloss: I had been to Liberia before war came. Their country was like America. But when war entered the country, it became desolate. The entire population of Liberia nearly perished. Their economy vanished before their eyes.)

That was the Fuji lord, Sikiru Ayinde Barrister, in his album Precaution, agonizing over the Liberian war and urging Nigerians to toe the path of peace. In that war, as the Fuji master reminisced, President Samuel Doe was literally butchered. Barrister could not get over the terrible footage of Doe’s slaughter; he lamented that someone as exalted as a Head of State was butchered up like an animal, but pinned the ordeal down to Doe’s greed and the natural comeuppance: “Atunbotan le ri yen o.”

Doe was butchered, but Liberia was then at war. But see what happened this week in Kogi State, where, per the Nigerian Tribune, two teenage girls identified as Ajuma Simon, 17, and Omojo Shuaibu, 18, were killed in an ambush by bandits. The tragic incident occurred in Okekwu village near Ogbogbo in Igalamela/Odolu LGA. The hapless girls were literally slaughtered, and the story is eerily similar to previous incidents across the country: “The victims were returning from a local market—Ega market—around 7 p.m. on Wednesday evening when they were attacked while trekking along a bush path leading to their village..An eyewitness, Yahaya Edibo, who narrated the incident, said, “Those who heard the victims shouting and calling for help during the attack responded too late. By the time they arrived at the scene, the victims had already been dismembered.”

Why are innocent people getting butchered like Doe when Nigeria is not at war? In his album, Barrister prayed that this land should not see war, but what shall we say now when no war is officially upon us but we see the horrors of war on a daily basis? Are we still trying, like Cyprian Ekwensi noted after the civil war in his novel of that title, to survive the peace? What kind of country are we running where children sent on errands by their parents end up under butchers’ knives, cut down in cold blood?

In his poem, “The Dining Table,” the Sierra Leonean poet, Gbanabom Hallowell, wrote: “Dinner tonight comes with/gun wounds/Our desert/tongues lick the vegetable/blood—the pepper/strong enough to push scorpions.” At dinner, our leaders battle meat and wine, but Hallowell’s dinner is one marked by guns, blood and scorpions, a powerful evocation of the mindless violence that engulfed the country during its civil war. Note again: during a war. Today, at this very moment, our land lives in peace, but it is peace supervised by demons, the same demons who once fed a woman’s newborn twins to dogs in the North. Will the leaders take the time to listen to the extremely serious album wherein the Fuji pioneer warned about the threat and agonies of war, and take caution?

In Yorubaland when certain criminals do the unthinkable, the elders ask in utter bewilderment: “Nilu to l’oba, to ni’joye? (In a land that has both king and chief?)  In other words: How can this kind of thing happen in a land that has a government? And that is my point today. Are there governors in this land? What are they governing? Are they carrying on like clowns simply because it is not their children being raped, butchered and skinned alive by demented criminals? Is governance all about taxing the citizenry and making grandiose speeches? Today, even youths obeying the clarion call and heading to NYSC camps are abducted, raped, tortured and enslaved.  I don’t understand what’s going on. Are parents supposed to accompany their children to and from NYSC camps, armed with clubs and cudgels? Why is governance virtually dead in the land and only politics dominates the public space?

If you see people painted like a house and speaking Queens English while supposedly praying to God, it is because they don’t have a problem. If a woman’s son is just about to be sentenced for murder or if she has a daughter scheduled for surgery, I assure you that she will pray very hard, and will discard lipstick very fast. People who have serious problems cannot be wearing agbada/babaringa and making empty, robotic speeches all the time. Our governors are like the woman of my imagination: they are too comfortable. And damnably so.

We have lashed President Bola Tinubu repeatedly but are we supposed to give our governors a pass? Is Tinubu the governor of the 36 states? Many of the governors are transparently useless. They are absolute misfits dragging agbada up and down and doing very little to better the people’s lot. They know next to nothing about governance, and are merely having a swell time at the expense of our lives. There is a governor in this country who can barely read or deal with figures. Through FAAC allocations, these governors get big pots of money, but what have they done for the people? They are busy window-dressing state capitals while other parts of their states remain resolutely in the stone age.

Amotekun men are in the forests fighting terrorists with Dane guns while terrorists wield sophisticated weapons. Yet our governors only talk about state police while doing next to nothing to actualise it. Week after week, it is one beautiful speech after another even as schoolgirls get raped and butchered.

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Pray, in the face of wanton bloodshed by terrorists, why is anyone still wearing the tag of service chief? Who are the service chiefs serving? In the face of the endless genocide visited on his people by Fulani terrorists, the Plateau State governor, Caleb Mutfwang, recently prayed the Federal Government to withdraw soldiers from flashpoints in the state and replace them with mobile policemen. I understand the governor’s anger, but he is merely replacing impotence with stroke. From soldier to police, our leaders talk about kinetic and non-kinetic warfare, and my reply to them is contained in Major Silva’s declaration to Corporal Chume, the illiterate trumpeter whom he is unsuccessfully trying to teach sheet music in Wole Soyinka’s Jero’s Metamorphosis: “If I tell you I understand one word of what you’re saying I commit the sin of mendacity.” Between the service chiefs, certain ungoverned governors and lawless federal lawmakers, the characters who recently mooted the idea of a talk show to tackle insecurity, I don’t even know who is more useless.