What a country
This is the saddest Easter Break I have had in all of my life. It is not about my life and my person. It is about the devilish manifestations that stare me in the face - bizarre happenings which suggest that evil has taken dominion of all lands and is exercising its will physically, metaphysically, and spiritually not just in Nigeria, but globally. I feel utterly powerless.
How can a plane load of unsuspecting passengers disappear from the face of the earth in what is reputed to be the most modern aircraft? Then a ferry conveying hundreds of school children in their innocence capsizes and for days, parents are staring the vast sea and can not do anything to save their loved ones? Daily all you hear is of the violent death of people in hundreds to bullets, bombs and avalanches. How can lawlessness get to the level that gunmen enter a school dormitory at night and simply shoot and kill sleeping children? Worse, would happen, for one could say the dead have no more worries. But imagine that a band of men, possessed, broke into a school and abducted 200 school girls and simply disappeared with them into the woods, what orgy of wickedness is on their minds and in what religious tenet did they find justification for this?
Men like you and I purposed in their hearts not even to take just one life but hundreds - indiscriminately and so packed a huge bomb whose making is now easy, and set it off at a park, choosing the peak early hour when hundreds would have assembled to go out in search of goodness. Boom! Hundreds are killed. Hundreds are wounded.
And yet we also die naturally from hunger and disease. Epidemics of HIV/AIDS, Malaria, Cancer, Ebola just name them killing by the hundreds.
Now life is lived by the second. No one who goes out has certainty of returning home. No one who sleeps, has certainty of waking up. And the living live on, hurriedly burying their dead and just keep living on. In that guise, we see our President mourning bomb victims in one moment and in the next moment, he is dancing at a party rally - something the old time religion forbade. What has happened to the quality of our leadership that in a multitude of aides, not one person gave matured counsel to mourn the dead and to speak anger to the terrorists.
And what are rulers and leaders of thought doing to return us to our bearing? I wish I could put it in words. What do I say that they do not know? What has not been said? What has happened to civic responsibility, good neighbourliness, humane feeling called iman? What has happened to our morality? What has happened to our patriotism? How have we derailed from love of continent, love of country, love of community, and now only love of self only - greed and avarice is all we see from the street to the high places, hardly anyone is above being compromised by money or the opportunity to get it?
I am frustrated and depressed and have prayed faithfully and patiently. In my anguish I have come close to blasphemy asking
She has a name. When I learnt of the incident, she was just a woman. Now I know she is called Lydia. The children also have names, tots both. Lorena and Lauretta, loved of their father who I now know is Michael Lawrence. The trauma of the day has come to some tragic relief. Lydia was a woman travelling to Benin to attend a relation’s wedding. She was with her husband Lawrence, and children Lorena and Lauretta. Between Jalingo and Wukari, a band of villagers halted them. She thought they needed help. In fact she reached out to the back seat of the car thinking they needed water and she had some to spare. They were there and then forced out of the vehicle and right before her and the children, they hacked her husband to death! Right there before them, in a flicker of a moment! No questions asked, just blood letting. Lydia and the children were herded into a village. “Use your phone,” they told her. “Tell your people you’re in a house in Bantaje”. And she did just that!
A team of security men have since raided Bantaje and successfully rescued Lydia and her two daughters. They were first taken to Mutum Biyu hospital and treated for trauma. They have noe been