How much is your empathy? -By Aisha Yesufu

When you hear that someone has been killed do you say the usual eyah ooooh, may their soul rest in peace and move on? Do you feel that it is none of your business and that it will never happen to you or do you feel the pain and imagine that you could be the next victim and think of ways to ensure that you do not become a victim? I have always marveled at people’s level of empathy and how some freely give of that empathy while some hoard their empathy and make it a very expensive one.

Those who are unable to relate to the pains of others, who are oblivious to the fact that they can be the next victim and are only able to feel empathy when they become victims or their loved one’s become victims have the most expensive empathy. Their personal pain is the price for their empathy and sadly we have a lot of such people. Nigeria is full of people with the most expensive empathy and so we have been unable to feel the pain of one another. We have not been able to put ourselves in the shoes of those who are being hurt. We have looked the other way and only felt pain when it happened to us and at that moment others refuse to feel the pain with us also.

This has continuously favoured government which has been allowed enabling environment to keep abdicating its responsibility and also the terrorists, bandits kidnappers and killer herdsmen who have been emboldened to attack more people by our inability to feel one another’s pain and have each other’s back. The killers are in competition to see who can gruesomely kill more citizens than the others. Each killing is more petrifying and paralysing than the last one heard of, but sadly has not been enough to awaken our empathy to resolve that when any one of us is killed then it means all of us are killed and we will all come out to ensure that not one of us is killed again.

What we tend to do is pray to God that we never fall victim and move on. How do people not realise that the last victim also thought he or she wouldn’t be victim? How do people not realise that priests, imams, everyone are becoming victims by the day and that even as we pray to God to keep us safe, we also have to act to keep ourselves safe and feel the pain of another before the pain gets to us?
Do we need to teach one another empathy?

A Nation without empathy is a Nation that has sentenced itself to chaos. That is sadly where we are. We have leaders who have no empathy for the people they govern, who do not feel their pain and put themselves in their shoes and wish to get them to a place better than where they are. Leaders who will spend billions on their wellbeing and give out 5 thousand naira to households when that said amount can barely do anything. Leaders who will access COVID-19 vaccines abroad without a single thought for the citizens they govern who do not have access to the vaccine and still flaunt it in the face of those citizens.

Lack of empathy has not helped us as individuals neither has it helped us a Nation. We must ensure we feel for another what we feel for ourselves. We must feel the pain of one another and take it as our pain and not wait for the pain to happen to us before we feel it.

We must make our empathy extremely cheap. We must give it free of charge. We must empathise and also ensure adequate precaution is taken for any tragedy not to happen again. That way we are watching out for ourselves. For we must always remember that, tomorrow’s victims will always be today’s survivors.

#CostlyEmpathy