For Humanity, Tragedy Creeps In Like The Agama Lizard -By Festus Adedayo

A friend told me the story of an elderly man he went visiting a few weeks ago. The man was his teacher in the primary school and decades after, told that the man, who turned 80 years in December, was still around, he and another student of the old man’s, decided to pay him a visit. The duo were more compelled to pay their former teacher a visit because he was bereaved and thus couldn’t celebrate his arrival in the octogenarian age. He had just lost one of his children, a policeman, in Sokoto, to bandits who are currently terrorizing that part of the country, a menace that has cost hundreds of human casualty and to which both state and federal governments have very feeble responses to. The young man had been transferred to Sokoto State and in the process, had to be engulfed by the banditry that has literally consumed the state. 

That the young policeman was killed wasn’t actually the story as the fact that, his bereaved family had to literally bear the cost of transporting his remains from Sokoto to Osun State. The police, I was told, barely scrounged out some pittance and left his family to ferret for the remainder.

Two very critical morals can be gleaned from this calamity. First is that, as a collective, we should be bothered about the fate of humanity wherever it may be threatened, whether in Zamfara, Nchatancha or even in any remotest part of the world. How could that family have known, at the outset of the banditry, that it would sit in the remote state of its and only to shed tears on account of a menace in Sokoto? When some parents are not teaching their children and they end up becoming social miscreants, they are the ones who enter the homes of hard-working, well-brought up children of ours and abridge their lives peremptorily. Almajiris whom we shudder at their thoughts, I am told, are willing recruits of Boko Haram now. A few years ago, some Ibadan, Bodija market traders going to the North to buy their goods, were reportedly slaughtered by Boko Haram insurgents somewhere in the northern enclave. How could their families have ever thought that they would partake of a menace that should ordinarily be a northern affair? Even national budget-wise, funds that should go to our upkeep and development as a nation are spent on imaginary military armament in the fight against the insurgents. So, when some people fail to bring up their children or bring them up haphazardly, they become burdens on those of us who spend Naira equivalents of oozes of their blood taking care of theirs.

In the late 1990s when the Charles Taylor, Samuel Doe intransigence, which resulted in a war, began, Tayo Awotunsin and Kris Imodibe’s families never imagined that they would partake of that intransigence from a country not theirs. In the late 1990s when the Sierra Leonean war broke out, my family never knew we would get a slice of our own calamity from the intransigence, until my younger suddenly went and joined the army and in less than six months of his enlistment, was airlifted to the war front. I got a terse message from the army as his next of kin that “your brother was missing in action.” I imagine how many more Nigeria has killed in such mindless manner.

When I heard about the young policeman killed in Sokoto, I reckoned that the police may either not give his family his entitlement or give him a sorry amount as death benefit. Till today, my family hasn’t got a kobo from the Nigerian Army that sacrificed my brother. We do not have any account of his remains either. It is the tragedy of our lives as Nigerians.