It was a week of blood and tears. A military helicopter, loaded with ammunition, went down in a crash. A school, with hundreds of students, went up in dark smoke. A suicide bomber, dressed as a student, walked into the assembly ground of Government Senior Science School, Potiskum, and left more than 50 students and teachers crushed in death.
How long shall we remain in this condition?
Two schools of thought have emerged as to how the bomber boldly entered the school and successfully performed the bloody enterprise in such a confident manner.
The first is that the bomber, young and innocent-looking, was dressed in the school uniform. He had a school bag secretly decorated with explosives.
Nobody knew about his mission. Was he really a student?
A mere secondary school student does not come across like someone convincingly schooled in the rudiments of terror to deliberately decide on a suicide mission.
He must have been forced into it. They must have pointed a gun at his head; or deceived him into believing that he was on a missionary journey.
Maybe they told him that he would be transplanted to safety before the explosion took place. He must have been completely brainwashed with demonic fantasy.
Or was the explosive-loaded school bag deceptively forced on him? That is to say he knew nothing about the contents? This is a huge possibility.
Someone at the school gate, perhaps someone he knew, a nephew or an uncle, must have asked him to help carry the bag to the assembly ground.
Whoever did that knew the boy won’t live to tell the tale and identify him. He must have begged the boy to handle the bag carefully and probably instructed him on the exact spot to stand and wait for him.
It is possible the bomb was timed. That means the boy did not have to press any button to have it exploded. Or the button was with someone hiding and watching at a reasonable distance.
All these are probabilities because it is difficult to assume that an adult stranger, not known to either the students or staff, could have walked into the assembly ground unidentified and carried out the deadly act.
As seconds ticked into minutes, and the students were either praying or singing or listening to instructions, the devil opened its mouth and swallowed the innocents in one deafening blast.
A contrary, more convincing, report on Wednesday stated that the suicide bomber was actually a stranger; dropped by a car at the school gate. He boldly walked into the school premises, dressed in school uniform.
He was stopped by a teacher whom he ignored and kept going. Suspicious, the teacher turned to the students as a way of asking if any of them knew him. The body language was in the negative.
Since it is a boarding school, it was strange to have a student arrive in the morning with a school bag, dressed in the school uniform. Confusion!
The teacher, alongside dozens of curious students, approached the stranger and further tried to stop him, having noticed that he was not one of them. He was surrounded and forced to kneel down. That was the moment the villain waited for. Spurred on by the spirit of death and the illusion of a heavenly bliss, the stranger must have mumbled a short, farewell prayer to himself.
Hell was on the loose, but neither the teacher nor the students could recognise it. The stranger in their midst was the devil himself. He carried with him a weapon of mass destruction.
This scenario is difficult to comprehend. What did those children do wrong? Oh, they went to school; they agreed to be educated, so that they would live useful lives.
Meanwhile, Boko Haram, an organisation that forbids western education, is using arms and ammunitions that are products of western education, to carry out its heinous acts.
Within a split second, the lives of several innocent students, happily sent to school by their parents but ambushed that morning by death, were cut short and transferred to the great beyond.
Government’s reaction to the tragedy was the usual condemnation. It was followed by a stronger resolve by President Goodluck Jonathan to deal with insurgency.
President Barack Obama’s comment was almost annoying. He condemned the killing and asked for immediate investigation.
What are we supposed to investigate? Is it to find out who did the killing or why they killed?
I want to be told otherwise, but my belief is that the United States of America has only succeeded in paying unfruitful lip-serve to the war against terror in Nigeria. When will they match their words with action?
In fifties and in hundreds, Nigerians are slaughtered daily. Orphans are increasing in number. Widows and widowers are uncountable. Parents are being deprived of their children, either through kidnapping or daylight massacre.
And in the midst of this, the world is watching. It wasn’t this bad in Iraq and Afghanistan when allied forces moved in. Just count our human losses in a week and tell me whether we are not worse than Iraq and Afghanistan.
What is the world waiting for? When will America or Britain practically mobilise against terror in Nigeria; just like France did when Mali was affected? Will they come when we are all dead?
Let the message go out loud and clear: we need help now!