Masari and his AK-47-wielding accomplice on Resurrection Day -By Festus Adedayo

When I saw the picture of Katsina State Governor, Aminu Bello Masari, a former Speaker of the House of Representatives, in a group photograph with a man clutching an AK-47 assault rifle, said to be the leader of bandits who killed and maimed hundreds of people in Katsina state recently, what came to my mind was Richard Rive’s short story entitled, Resurrection.  Resurrection is a story in Alex la Guma’s collection of short stories entitled Quartet. It was set at a funeral.

Old Maria Wilhelmina Loupser, who though black, was married to a white man, had just died at the age of 75. Frustrated till she headed for the sepulcher, she had four children, Jim, Rosie and Sonny who were white and Marvin, whose skin pigmentation marks her out for the mockery of the then South African white-dominated system. Marvin was black like her mother. Due to the color of their skins, the children hated their mother to her death. Because she constituted a source of embarrassment to them, especially in the presence of their friends who came visiting, Old Maria and Marvin were consigned to the kitchen’s back door and lived inside the boys’ quarters.

“They want me out of the way too, Ma, because you made me black like you, I am also your child, Ma. I belong to you. They want me also to stay in the kitchen and use the back door. We must not be seen, Ma, their friends must not see us. We embarrass them, Ma, so they hate us. They hate us because we’re black. You and I, Ma,” Marvin soliloquized by the corpse of Old Maria.

The part of Resurrection that suits the scandal in Katsina State that is Masari is Marvin’s stream of soliloquy, punishing one at that, a long mourn of Old Maria’s painful death and searing fate in the hands of her white children.

Rive, reporting Marvin’s dialogue with Old Maria over their racial fates as mother and child in the hands of their blood kin, had said: “And she had tormented the Old Woman, who did not retaliate. Who could not retaliate. Who could not understand. Now she sat tortured with memories as they sang hymns for Ma.”

Masari, apparently in his search for peace in Katsina State, had entered into negotiations with the dangerous and maniacal bandits whose atrocities have painted the media crimson. Apart from their kin, Boko Haram insurgents, these bandits have caused so much unmitigated havoc in the country, killing hundreds of people and freezing investments into the zone. In Masari’s photo-op with the leader of the bandits, who is asking the simple question: what is the lot of hundreds of people who were sent to their painful early graves by the bandits? Who is negotiating for their families at the moment while Masari is negotiating with the bandits? Who is negotiating for the hundreds of the maimed, families that are literally dead here on earth as a result of the madness of the bandits? Who is negotiating for them?

Like every Third World country where attention is seldom on the victims but their victimizers, it is apparent that the world’s attention would be on the stumbling block to peace which the bandits are and not those whose lives they have taken. This is where I find Rive’s very instructive. Like the tormented Old Maria Wilhelmina Loupser, the victims of Katsina’s bandits are lying disconsolate in a God-knows-where, forlorn and lost to the world. Fathers are weeping uncontrollably somewhere, lamenting the losses of their children who were slaughtered like rams by the maniacal bandits. Soldiers who were killed by the bandits had wives, fathers, mothers and siblings, you know?

Like the tormented Old Woman who did not retaliate, who could not retaliate, the victims are lying in some dinghy sepulcher, unable to retaliate and dead to the emotions and sympathy of the world. But beyond them, their dependents who have no wherewithal to continue this journey would never understand, like Old Maria, why their lives can never and would never matter to the Masaris.

The one that seems most bothersome is the picture of the Chief Security Officer of President Muhammadu Buhari’s home state in camaraderie with an acknowledged bandit. Perhaps the next picture we would have is the President himself in a pose with one of the gangsters. The only fitting analogy in Resurrection that I can imagine is a Marvin asking for a photo-op with her tormentors, Jim, Rosie and Sonny. It was even said that there are negotiations between the bandits and government and arrested murderers/bandits are being exchanged for people who were kidnapped. When did Nigeria or its state become this type of sissy that it had to surrender state power to bandits?

Anyway, as Masari negotiates with the bandits, can he please spare a thought for the victims as well; the hapless soldiers whose families lay disconsolate back home, the thousands of people who are homeless at the moment and the thousands of dependents of the dead whose tomorrow has been punctured midstream?