We Never Learn!

I cringe every time I remember the ALUU 4 The way four students were murdered in cold blood based on false accusations by a man who owed them money. I remember Deborah and many like her who were murdered in cold blood in the Northern part of Nigeria and my heart sinks.

The Uromi killings are evil. Nobody has the right to take the lives of other people based on suspicions and even vengeance. No citizen of Nigeria has the right to take the life of another citizen based on suspicions and false or even real accusations. We have the police Force as a nation. A citizen’s arrest could be made and the suspects handed over to the government. Those of us celebrating or defending the killings are either looking backwards or being short sighted. If indeed we are looking in the direction, we ought to be looking a short-sighted-lize that preventing more deaths in the future is more important than avenging the deaths of the past. We do not repay evil with evil, we overcome evil with good. Good has the power and the capacity to overcome evil any day and anytime.

Many of us are salivating for the taste of blood instead of condemning the killings outrightly. The killers are on video, and they must be brought to justice. That is the right thing to do. The killings in every part of Nigeria by groups designated as terrorists or otherwise must stop. There is nothing to gain by descending into barbarism in the name of “they do it too” or “they did it first”.

On my short life, I have escaped lynching once and police extrajudicial killing once. The first in 2001 at Eruwa (a town in South-Western Nigeria located in Oyo state) when I went to check on my girlfriend not knowing that the indigenes were at war with Cultists. I arrived in Eruwa on a Saturday from the University of Ibadan where I was a student. I didn’t know cultists wearing black Mafian suits and branding axes had been trooping into town that same day. The cultist struck and accidentally killed the mother of an indigene.

Curfew was declared and the indigenes led by hunters began to hunt down all those who came to town that day. That was how they came for me in the middle of the night. My ID card was with me, but it only proved their point. To them I was a cultist from another school who came to carry out an operation in the town. I begged, the babe I went to see cried her eyes out. It was the end. Other cultists and non-cultists who were caught had been killed but God sent an angel in form of an elderly man who came in to vouch for me and called me his son! I knew what it means to be falsely accused, given no room to defend yourself and then judged by the mob to die!

The second time, I was saved by my mother’s phone call in the nick of time. I, and a group of friends met at Cute Guest house Agbowo (a well-known location within Ibadan, Oyo state Nigeria) in 2022, after a nationwide ASUU strike was declared. We talked for a bit and one of them said he had unsmoked marijuana in his pocket. Everyone agreed to go to the bush behind the hotel to smoke it, then my mum called, and I ran home because of her tone. By the time I returned, all my friends were dead. Shot dead by SARS members who had been hiding in the bush because the landlord association invited them to help them curb armed robbery attacks in the area. We had no idea that the security of the area had been beefed up because we were all in school. When I remember the guys that died, I shrug!

The police took pictures of them in cold blood with AK-47 on their chests. These are guys whose school bags were kept with the bar man just to go and smoke a joint. I stopped keeping friends from that time and I definitely stayed away from marijuana (I was never a smoker but peer pressure) would have cut short my life that day.

I cited the examples above because in the two instances I was only in the wrong place at the wrong time, and I could have paid for that with my life. We cannot just assume people are evil and must be killed because we suspect their motive or dressing. When we do things like this and praise things like this, we launch a grenade into the very fragile fabric of this nation and our peace as a people. I sincerely hope many of us who are toying with war will never experience it.

The right thing to do is to arrest a suspect and hand such over to the police We must sate our appetite for blood We are not vampires We are not blood thirsty We are better than how we have conducted ourselves on these issues. A mallam’s life is of equal value in the eyes of God to the life of any other man.

-GSW-