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Once agains a mother cries. She has lost her child whose crime was being in the wrong place. The place where barbarians were.
An Okada rider nearly hit a pregnant woman. That happens. Some people beat and stabbed him. That happens. They should fear the law and be arrested. He stabbed someone too. That happens; he should be arrested. Perhaps he died. That happens. It is unfortunate; whoever killed him should be arrested and sentenced for manslaughter or murder. He may be killed or pay blood money.
But what happens next in Nigeria is what worries the most. The barbarians are unleashed. Blood-thirsty barbarians set out on a murder and vandalize mission. Like canines, they lack color vision. They cannot differentiate between the persons who committed the crime and everyone else who appears to be of the ethnic group. The barbarians hunt in packs like dogs. They go and burn shops of Hausa or shops of Yorubas or shops of Igbos. They believe they are exacting revenge by doing so. “After all it was one of yours.” I wrote of this in 2013. I called it “Genocidal thinking.”
An innocent man walks along in the wrong place at the wrong time. The barbarians find him. He appears to be of the group hunted. They pounce on him and set him ablaze. They howl like wilder-beasts as they drink his blood.
Others celebrate their actions from far off; some brother jackals online rejoice. “They deserved it,” they say. “That group has bad eggs so they all deserve to be killed…why did one of ‘them’ do that? They all deserve death. Kill them all,” the barbarian fans say.
In Nigeria we have departed from God. We have forgotten God’s law that says, “whoever kills must be killed.” Boko Haram terrorists who kill en mass are spared death; we give them life. We have violated God and violated the land. Indicted politician sponsors of terrorists and political killer thugs are in our hallowed chambers. God’s wrath is on us; it is a promise He has made, that whoever departs from righteousness will get the painful reward. Our wickedness has revealed us as beasts. Blood drinking barbarians.
I had hoped Buhari would declare war on barbarism. It only takes one stern announcement, spread through all media channels, “that the new government will not tolerate a single person or animal in human form taking the law into his own hands.” Continues, “from now on, terrorists, political killer thugs and mob murderers will be sentenced to death as the law dictates.” But Buhari hasn’t. In fact, he has even defended barbaric behavior by his military generals. “I am a sitting duck,” he says. “If not, for touching a soldier’s chest, those people would have suffered more”…than ‘just’ that massacre of 1000+ of their kind. In Nigeria, the reward for a mis-endeavor or misdemeanor is instant barbaric judgement with the sentencing to death of you and your kind; delivered not by courts, but by civilians or the military. Like I said earlier, courts give life to terrorists. This is the way of Nigeria. The 100-year entrenched barbarism that started since colonization is far from its end.
It is challenging to be a Nigerian. A citizen of a land of barbarians.
Dr. Peregrino Brimah @EveryNigerian