Sliding into bestiality

Pastor Babatunde Dada, a clergyman with the Redeemed Christian Church of God (RCCG) attached to the Chapel of Resurrection, FESTAC Town in Lagos State, was stabbed to death inside the church penultimate week by two purported new converts. The assailants were said to have visited the church the Sunday before the incident for the first time and had given ‘their lives to Christ’. As a result of their claim of being without accommodation, the leadership of the church allowed the ‘new converts’ to stay on the church premises. But unfortunately, that is a decision the parish’s pastoral council will regret for a long time to come because the ‘new souls just won for the Lord’ ended up killing Pastor Dada, who was also the church accountant. The killing terminated Dada’s one year old marriage and turned his young pregnant wife into a widow. Among other things, Dada’s attackers made away with his phone.

A teacher at the Army Children Senior High School, Epe, Mr Abdulsaheed Hammed, was recently gunned down, by people suspected to be his students, at his shop in Poka area of the town. Mr Hammed’s offence was his hard stance on cultism and unruly behaviour among the students. He was said to have punished a student who belonged to a secret cult and the student had promised to deal with the late teacher. To get even with him, Hammed, who ran an electronics shop, was lured to his shop by the killers after lying to him that they wanted to buy electrical equipment.

Recently in Edo State, a housewife stabbed her husband to death after being caught by the husband with another man on their matrimonial bed in her bid to facilitate her lover’s escape.

The deceased, who had two wives housed in different parts of Jattu, Etsako West Local Government of the state, alternated his nights with the wives. On the fateful day, he had told the junior wife that he would spend the night with the senior wife only to return earlier than scheduled and found his junior wife in bed with another man. The enraged husband went for the wife’s lover but the woman, in order to aid the escape of her lover, got a knife and stabbed her husband several times, killing her in the process.

But what would make two young men fake their conversion and lie about being stranded only to kill a member of an organization trying to help them? What kind of people would profess a faith just to have access to the man who kept the church’s purse with a view to killing him and making away with the church’s money and his personal effects? What manner of young men would treat the house of God with so much disdain that they had no compunction shedding the blood of a man of God in God’s temple?

What would make a secondary school student to be so deep in cultism that at such a young age the only thought of revenge he could imagine was to snuff life out of a man trying to put him on the right path? What kind of secondary school students are we raising in the country? Why it that while cultism is seems to be waning in the nation’s tertiary institutions it is gaining ground in the secondary schools?

What manner of wife would kill her husband to save the face of her lover? What would make a woman who professed love to a man stab the same man several times until the man was killed? If she hated her husband that much why did she keep putting up with him?

All these are signs of the loss of humanity and the degeneration into bestiality. It is only in the jungle that a female animal would kill the male, or vice versa, without any sense of guilt. It is only animals that feast on their own dead. It is only in the jungle that instinct rather than reason reigns. It is only in the jungle that might is right. It is only in the jungle that the sanctity of life is disregarded.

In Nigeria, fatal conflicts have become a regular occurrence. Security operatives and civilians are killed almost on a daily basis without any scruple. In the same vein, churches are raided, mosques are attacked, clergymen are decapitated, traditional rulers are kidnapped and members of the political class are subjected to opprobrium. No one is spared; no institution is regarded as sacred. How did we arrive at this pass of loss of our humanity? How did it happen that we no longer have any value for either the living or the dead? What has deprived us of our humanity? Or better still, how did we degenerate into the status of lower animals? How did we become beasts?

Bestiality is the precursor of dehumanisation. When bestiality is allowed to continue without any challenge, it leads to the denigration of the other person; he is scorned and dehumanised. When the denigration of the human person is encouraged, it attracts annihilation. That is what happened in Germany that resulted in the World War II. It happened in Rwanda and resulted in a pogrom that saw about 800,000 people killed.

Our slide into bestiality needs to be arrested. We need to reverse the trend in Nigeria and regain our humanity before it is too late. But the question is do we have the will to stop the slide?

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