By Emeka Alex Duru
(08054103327)
I must confess from the onset that the headline to this piece, is not original to me.
I picked it from a facebook, social media page of a friend, in which two kids of about two and four years, were featured, brandishing a placard with inscriptions, “SAVE MY PARENTS!!!. #STOPBENUEKILLINGS#
Not many Nigerians, would really appreciate the magnitude of despondency the message by the kids portrayed. But coming from a background of an assaulted psyche, it is easy for me to understand the message they conveyed.
What do I mean? As a kid of less than five years, one was unfortunate to encounter the Nigerian civil war and the accompanying travails.
With a family house that was merely a shouting distance from Bishop Shanahan College, Orlu that was converted into a Biafran Army Barracks, it was normal for one to be exposed to sounds from guns and other lethal weapons, early enough.
Given also that the Barracks was a target for regular bombardment by the “Enemy Forces”, as the Federal Troops were then called, sight of the dead and injured, at a time, became normal, even at that infancy stage.
For us, though young and lacking in training, we were forced to learn the art of diving or “taking cover”, to avoid being killed by the rampaging Jet Bombers and Fighters.
And in this game of survival, there was really nothing anybody could do for another. It was not the type parents would do for their children.
At best, they could offer themselves as protective shields, preferring to be killed alongside their children. But in most cases, it was everybody for himself and God for all, as the saying goes.
At each session of the “air raid”, survivors celebrated their luck, while the unlucky ones were buried in shallow graves, with no burial rites.
Even those that escaped death at a particular episode, knew that they merely lived for the moment, as the messenger of death which the Jets represented, could visit any time of the day or night.
Because of the pervading air of uncertainty, there were no plans for the children, for the family and for the future.
There was nothing certain about living. It was almost a case of living and waiting for death, except that none knew when it would come. Dislocation was the order of the day.
By the time the field hostilities were eventually over in 1970, it was not surprising that many families had been massively destabilized.
Aside loss of loved ones in action or on account of bombings in residences, churches, markets or village square where they had run for refuge, the gruesome experiences of those 30 months of horror, still persist in many parts of Igboland.
Some of the girls that were ceased from their villages by the ravenous federal troops, in what passed as war booties, have never returned to their people, 48 years after. And may never do so.
Some of the children who lost their parents in the mayhem, never had anybody to mentor them. With that experience of abandonment, they sauntered into adulthood, ill-prepared.
Some parents who lost their children, never recovered from the shock. There were other unpleasant consequences of the war.
When therefore, I stumbled on the placard by the two innocent kids, my mind raced to the menace of the Fulani Herdsmen in Benue and the fate of the people now and the years ahead.
I had in a previous article, entitled, “In Benue, Nigeria dies”, bemoaned the festival of death in the State. I had particularly been pained by the conspiracy of silence from relevant authorities on the massacre in the state.
Though the President, Muhammadu Buhari and some functionaries of the government, had belatedly visited the state, the bloodletting is yet to abate. It has rather been on the upswing.
By the last count, the merchants of death have taken their wicked agenda to places of worship, with murder of two Catholic Priests along with 15 of their parishioners in the early hours of Tuesday, April 24, 2018.
The Priests, Fr. Joseph Gor and Fr. Felix Tyolaha, along with their parishioners were killed in the course of the celebration of the Holy Mass.
Somehow, one of the Priests, Fr. Gor, seemed to have had the premonition of his death in the hands of the blood hounds. He was said to have tweeted on January 3 this year: “We are living in fear. The Fulani are still around here in Mbalom (where they were killed). They refuse to go. They still go grazing around. No weapons to defend ourselves.”
Nobody, listened to him, nor acted on his warning. And they were eventually killed. Painfully!
I have tried to imagine what would be running in their minds when they saw death coming. For the Reverend Fathers, I could see them, like Saint Stephen, looking up to Heaven, surrendering their souls and asking God to forgive their killers for they knew not what they were doing.
I could also imagine the feeling of the Parishioners, who were offering prayers for “Nigeria in distress”, but were mowed by countrymen that did not know God.
As Catholics, I am sure they would have asked God to forgive the misguided souls that dispatched them to their early graves.
If their martyrdom is what it would take Nigeria to get it right and say, “thus far and no further”, I am sure that as faithful servants of God, their souls would be at rest for their redemptive roles.
But would that be the case? I am afraid, it would not. In present day Nigeria, nothing seems to move us, no matter the magnitude.
Gradually but persistently, we have acquired the sorry epithet of a system that feeds on its own. This is why, even while other countries express outrage at the rate at which blood is being spilt in the country, our leaders carry on with shocking calmness. This is how not to be a nation.
None of the State governors has spoken out forcefully against the carnage in Benue. Nor has the President taken any action that suggests that he is genuinely at pains with the loss of life in the state. They are rather concerned with 2019 general elections.
The fact, however, is that the development in Benue has become a cancerous thumb that must be attended to or we risk losing the other fingers, if not the entire limb. It is usually a spark that results to a conflagration, if not well managed. The killings in Benue must be stopped.
