Òffa Killings And The Necessity Of Reflection -By Kehinde Oluwatosin B.

Over 30 persons were killed including six police officers.

Amúkùn erù e wó is how the Yoruba language accounts for the ignorance of onlookers who blames the asymmetric positioning of an heavy load on the head of a man with a K-leg without looking at his non-linear legs. Amúkùn (the man with the K-leg) often responds to his interlocutors with a passionate appeal not to look at the asymmetry of his load but should rather blame his K-leg for how the load was poorly positioned .

The painful killings of innocent and complicit citizens (police) in òffà , Kwara state on the fifth day of April, 2018 by dare-devil armed robbers opens a window into the cultural acceptance of responsibility by amúkùn and the lessons we have failed to learn from the amúkùn as a people . What we failed to learn from the amúkùn is his ability to put his challenges in perspective. Unlike us who often respond to a tragedy with repeated cycles of ‘eyah’ and ìkúnlè abiamo ò and also a picture of the victims for our social media consumption, but later forget the entire seen especially when our kiths and kins are not involved , amúkùn looks at his challenge from a foundational perspective .

I have chosen not to join the bandwagon of people who responds to a tragedy with ‘eyah’ but rather I will provide an insight into how our social norms and poor value system is why the experience of robberies and mindless killings has become a commonplace in our society. I will not blame our leaders here, they have responded to the tragedy in their usual way by condemning it, condemning a crime on facebook is their own way of showing support, blame them not ,we all know them to be like that from time immemorial.

I blame us -the followers/citezens for our lopsided value system, before you enter into the realm of your multiple ‘eyahs’ do not forget you are the ones that passionately chorused after the original singer that “if you no get money, hide your face”, you are the ones that refers to ‘blowing’ as the only and true metric of success, you are the ones that pulverized and polarized the whole system into haves and have nots, you are the ones that exhorted 30 billion naira music as the minimum standard of the wealth a man should posses, that the song was released at a point where the country toiled in dire reccesion does not matter, it’s also important to remind you that you also devided human built spaces into GRAs, Estates and ensured they have nothing to do with ghettos and shanties, how come are you now bitter about the outcome your lopsided value system created? The robbers who carried out the robbery were only trying to meet the standards of success you defined for them, they also want to ‘blow’ ,they also want to leave in GRAs, they want to be accepted and meet your standards , hence they went for the jugular. We have not been able to connect our complicity in all of these because we are not like the amúkùn who looks within to find lasting solutions to his challenges,but we rather prefer to confuse the symptoms with the disease.

Kehinde Oluwatosin B. is a prolific writer and public speaker from Abeokuta ,Ogun State.

Email :Kehindeobabatunde@gmail.com