When life’s one and a half kobo

Here’s a simple test: by the morning of Saturday April 30 when this piece is being read, none of the noisy packs of hyenas disturbing the public peace with their loquacious run for president would have said anything at all about Stephanie Se-Ember Terungwa, the  NYSC member found butchered in the most grievous circumstances in Abuja this week. They are that ignorant and uncaring. I promise to acknowledge anyone of them who proves me wrong. Stephanie, a graduate of microbiology based in Makurdi, Benue State but undergoing her NYSC at the FCT, Abuja, was last seen at the Lokogoma area of Nigeria’s capital city on Thursday April 14. Her disappearance was announced on Facebook by one Richard Lorliam, her relation, who said she was abducted with her one-year-old son while returning from a community development service (CDS) exercise. The baby was later found but not his mum: “Pls share till she is found,” Lorliam pleaded. But it fell the lot of the victim’s friend, Rachael Iveren Ingbian, to drop the bombshell on Facebook:  “She was found but not alive…”

The pictures of the corpse on social media are gory: Stephanie had been murdered in her NYSC uniform, her private parts cut off. That was her reward for obeying the clarion call to lift her nation high under the sun or in the rain. From her photos as a living soul, it was clear that this was a breathtakingly beautiful young woman. Alas, she must now dine only with the dead, while the politicians who went on campaign rallies promising her security, peace and progress carouse with chicks and choice wine, building the nation in the manner of the Permanent Secretary in the poem of that title by Uganda’s Henry Barlow. After all, as they say in Nigeria, they “cannot come and kill” themselves! It’s power they want, not anybody’s wretched destiny.

In his great poem Nightfall in Soweto, the South African poet Oswald Mtshalli paints a frightening picture of nightlife in apartheid South Africa, where nightfall came like a dreaded disease seeping through the pores of a healthy body and ravaging it beyond repair. Hear him: “A murderer’s hand/lurking in the shadows/clasping the dagger/strikes down the helpless victim.” Was Mtshalli speaking for all of time? Like the persona in Mtshalli’s poem, the average Nigerian can sing this dirge: “I am the victim/I am slaughtered/every night in the streets/I am cornered by the fear/gnawing at my timid heart/ in my helplessness I languish.” Man, as Mtshalli  cried in despair, has indeed ceased to be man and “become beast.” And the Beasts of No Nation, per Fela Anikulapo-Kuti, are playing the ostrich, singing ambitional lyrics to a dying land. The land stinks with the blood of innocent people cut down in their prime and fed to the demons of blood lust. The Dzogbese Lisa that has treated them thus and led them “among the sharps of the forest” where “returning is not possible and going forward is a great difficulty”, per Kofi Awoonor, is Nigeria’s rudderless government.

Young ladies “served breakfast” (the new euphemism for heartbreak) and struggling for daily gari are further served lunch (my euphemism for gross physical abuse), or served dinner (my euphemism for death), and then left to rot on the streets. This is a regular feature of life in deadly enclaves run by drug gangs. This is a country where a man had to uproot and sell his own roof to rescue his son from the claws of kidnappers; the country where a set of twins just birthed by a mother in captivity were fed to her abductors’ dogs. It is the same country where a judge subjected a father whose daughter had been thrown to her death in a well by her mother’s pal to three straight hours of questioning in the dock. Dogs wear wigs and think themselves to be gods in this land whose bloodguilt stinks to the high heavens, a land due for the fire of recompense.

The victims are no saints. That’s not the point. These days, many women wearing a forest of hair lack the brains of an ant. Immersed in the fast and fake life, they walk into death with open arms. But it is the government’s duty to protect the weak from being breakfasted  by the strong; to protect people against even their own selves, their basest instincts. That being the case, I cannot give any honours to a government under whom the last has become one vast killing field, and where terrorists dictate policy. The masses of the South-East can hardly trade or eat without enduring a barrage of gunfire from demons proclaiming Biafra while decimating the population. Everywhere in this land, herders rape women on their farms, then tear their bodies up with knives and machetes. Their song is bloodshed and their dance misery, never mind the Bard of Avon and his sermon: “There is no sure foundation set on blood, no certain life achieved by others’ death.” The fact is that bloodshed brings terrorists billions in the face of state surrender. Did not the master of words himself say that “for murder, though it have no tongue, will speak with most miraculous organ”? What if murder is a billionaire weapon?

Life is worthless in 2022 Nigeria. Robbery attacks in traffic are routine. The roads are highways to hell under the bullets and machetes of outlaws. The airports either pay levies or get blown to smithereens. Death inhabits the rail tracks. And villages and cities in a fairy land where human parts are falsely summoned in the bid to mint money. Worldwide, entrepreneurs look for a need and plug the gap, giving people what they did not previously think they needed. Elon Musk, the business rave of the moment, imagined that the world needed electric cars and perfected his plan. The results are in: with an estimated net worth of around US$252 billion this month Musk, the fella who just acquired that noisy community of gold called Twitter is the world’s wealthiest person.

From founding SpaceX, an aerospace manufacturer and space transport services company; creating SolarCity, a solar energy services company, and co-founding OpenAI, a nonprofit research company that promotes artificial intelligence, among others, Musk has come a long way. But the demons in this land believe that the road to wealth and power lies in human parts. That is why Stephanie Terungwa lies in a morgue, her eyes permanently sealed against the sun. Life today has become what the Yoruba call kobo kan-abo (one and a half kobo), as worthless as worthless can be, and I do not know what to think anymore.

Re: That Dubai orgy

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