Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity-Martin Luther King, Jr.
Her name, simply Mama Ebuke, an Ebonyi woman, she has known nothing but suffering, carrying wares from one street to the other. If she’s not on Tafawa Balewa street, she’s on Ahmadu Bello Way. On that fateful day, she was on the meat sellers’ axis of the now Old Terminus market…That was the last…She is dead!
Mama Fidelis, she is Miango, of the seven tubers of yam she regularly carried on her head, rain, sun, and shine…only one was hers as a profit. So even if she sold four, she still had three more to go if she was to make a profit. On a good day, she would do three or four runs, and that would be an approximate of N300 to the purse, with five kids, that was her routine. She died as a result of the blast…whether it was a bomb blast, suicide or homicide bomber, a parked car of female in hijab is inconsequential.
You could blame the society, lazy husbands, and failed institutions…Both women died less than three minutes walk from the spot of a bomb blast in Jos in May, killing several hundreds. Weeks earlier, it was Umar who died, he had gone to make the obligatory Friday prayer, after bidding his wife goodbye. His wife and daughter had come to his small shop near the emir’s palace to greet him. He grumbled and grumbled that it was time for prayers. They left and at least they would see at home. Umar had just married Aisha last year and had Fatimah, the first child. That was the last both wife and daughter saw of the man. Umar was victim of the Kano Mosque bombing, same city where many have died, many ordinary Nigerians, all but not one politician or leader.
Several thousands of Nigerians would spend Christmas as internally displaced persons, no hope, no hopeless, and far from their usual little comforts of life as peasant farmers, traders, and guess what life goes on. So really what kind of life goes on? That is the subject of my admonition. In the last two weeks, it has been one political party primary after another, majorly the PDP and APC, with the presidential exercise ending the trail. The fallouts were that in the National Assembly, for example, almost 15 legislators are not returning like Abike Dabiri or Ndoma. Maybe interesting is the fact that in Plateau, the Berom dynasty is about to begin or continue, and in Sokoto state, in-laws will slug it out via father and son-law. In Lagos, it will be “shun” of the soil versus “settler” in Ambode versus Agbaje. Rivers will be Dame Patience’s adopted son Wike vs Amaechi’s anointed. While all these are the highlights, Nigerians are decimated through avoidable deaths.
Those of us still alive take to social media, remain in public parliaments and humor zones with palm wine, pepper soup and enough hatred and ignorance accompanying the opera to marshal our arguments along divided lines. The lines are very clear, “you don’t like Buhari, you will never like him, and if you hate Jonathan it is as simple as that, you can’t love him”. Our Otuekan son Jonathan and our beloved Northern son Buhari, and we continue the debate, defining and redesigning good governance. While the truth remains that all these are products of nearby general elections, and the political airspace naturally is on heat, we forget that no politician has been blown up by bombs or are really bothered about you. No politician has been attacked in a Church, Mosque or by male or female suicide bomber, on the contrary the venues of the bazaar has been protected to the teeth by those meant to protect us.
In the last one year, several Mama Ebukes, Mama Fidelis, Umars, Shehus, Bankoles and more have been killed and no one cared, the Chibok girls will spend this Christmas and barring any miracle, life would simply go on. Let me end with the following lines by a girl who lost the mother to a blast in Nyanya, near the Nigerian capital early this year: I hate you truly. Truly I do. Everything about me hates everything about you. The flick of my wrist hates you. The way I hold my pencil hates you. The sound made by my tiniest bones hates you. Each corpuscle singing in its capillary hates you. Look out! For! I hate you. If this is who you really are, than I want you far… If this is what a nation is, than I never want one…You abandon me in my time of need, left me with nothing…What comes around goes right around…I looked for you and hell is what I found! I should have been your princess with a crown instead; you treated me like I was your clown…Betrayed me and left me with a frown!! Look at my tears, and all the fears?
Till we get a pin on our buttocks, we continually act out our ignorance, consoling ourselves, that it’s not as bad as it is. Do our leaders really care, is there hope or we are just conscientiously stupid? Only time will tell.
