TODAY, LET ME MOURN
It was 18:30pm of the 22nd day of October 2020. I rushed to my friend’s apartment in an ill advised attempt to catch the unsurprising speech of President Muhammed Buhari. As he read out his speech, a certain feeling of anger started boiling in me. While I did not expect him to do any better, I was, like most of us, particularly shocked by his wilful decision to ignore the incidence of the attack of peaceful protesters by the Nigerian Army at Lekki toll gate on the 20th of October 2020. My anger became mixed with betrayal. How can you not? Just how!
The Nigerian Army had attacked Nigerian citizens who were only armed with the Nigerian flag in solidarity, in peaceful demand. They had sat together, arms locked with each other chanting the National anthem to the point where their voices were broken by the possibilities of that moment being their last yet they held faith to both the National flag and National anthem. When we sing the National anthem, we expect a renewed form of hope, an assurance that we are stronger than what divides us and our faith in a better Nigeria is somehow renewed. The writers of the anthem invoked both the ancestry of our nation and culled a clarion call to living compatriots. That night, none of these mattered. The national anthem was said in defeat as brave compatriots fell in numbers to the Nigerian Army. While this atrocious act happened, the government of Lagos State, the Federation and Segalink enjoyed peaceful slumber.
In a surprise turn of event, the Lagos State government denied any involvement. The Governor while admitting the attack, attributed same to forces beyond his control and the Nigerian Army dismissed the information as untrue, false and, misleading. Somehow the entire nation had a collective nightmare and we needed to realize what we thought happened at Lekki toll gate was a figment of our imagination.
…
Following the President’s speech, there has been relative calm everywhere. The type that speaks more of a defeated spirit than a settled home. It dawned on us that we were in a battle against a government that did not care if they kill us, and was also comfortable writing away our existence. Something similar to how Yakubu Gown dismissed the cries of the defunct republic of Biafra.
“The atmosphere that rented the air has made me reflect on what the Igbos felt after Biafra lost the war — the calm of a defeated people. The difference here is that we were not a group of secessionist.”
We were simply Nigerians who had begged for hope for far too long that we now demanded it. We were only demanding a chance at life in Nigeria. We were demanding that our protectors stopped killing us. This we did in one voice, with a heightened sense of belonging, calling for the 5 for 5 reforms under the platform of what many now consider the ill-fated #ENDSARS protest. The protest grew organically, not because it was politically inspired or in any way bankrolled by interests but because we were, we still are, united by our collective pain, distrust and weariness. It felt real, it felt surreal. Hope came alive, we were more patriotic than we had ever been. We felt it was time! It looked to be our only chance at surviving.
In all these, there was the attendant fear of what government reaction would be but we expected that by rules of engagement, a civil protest as peaceful as ours should only warrant peaceful and stately reactions. We were wrong. The only supposed extreme in our protest was our not wanting negotiations. We wanted the government to get on its tracks and start off. You cannot blame us for this. We were dealing with a government with an unrepentant history for failing to satisfy the outcome of negotiations. If the Nigerian Labour Congress and Academic Staff of Universities Union had not seen fruits from all they negotiated with the government, what chance did we have?
We were Nigerians who believed in “peace, unity, faith and progress” and maybe that was our undoing. Not because there is anything wrong in that but because we are unfortunate to have leaders who live by such fantastically low moral standards and who exalt their own genius of evil.
“For them, intelligence is in scheming on how to fool the people into voting them into power, how to compel their loyalty and keep them in chains by exploiting license of poverty. All these at the expense of good governance.”
It is ironically sad when you think of it. We demanded the basics of good governance. Something that should come without saying, something that gives government true legitimacy.
We live in a country where scholars are abandoned abroad after being offered fully funded scholarships, where every inquiry panel leads to the opening of cans of worm, where a minister goes before the National Assembly to announce his thuggery, where a Governor’s convoy will shoot at unarmed citizens without any reprimand or punishment, where we literally have to beg the President to address the nation — the same President who sends warm wishes to other Presidents once they sneeze and who has spent much of his time in office on a world tour. No country has it right but it is almost hilarious how bad we have it here. We have a government with more concerns on how they can blame past administrations, than on how to fix existent issues which they only remarkably exacerbate and you wonder who they hope to blame for that as well.
I don’t know where or how to go from here. Nothing feels right anymore. Reading tweets from FK Abudu and Moe and the Feminist Coalition has dampened me even more. A part of me feels like the Israelite before the Red Sea. I want to wish we did not even go this far. The realization of going this far and failing is that at our best, we lost. A part of me wishes we had saved us some fault, some excuse. Right now, it feels like we lost. Like we are just pawns for their chess board and they will always be stronger. This reality is naked and stark and it curdles the blood to admit.
My father once told me that anyone who witnessed the war knows that the government is too strong and too powerful. I would often argue against this. Sometimes saying Ojukwu did not prepare well for it. Often saying to him that their generation had men who were lacking in bravery. He would often laugh off my energy and dismiss it as child’s thought. He would say to me in Igbo, “Ogologo abughi na nwa m etoola” (the height or body size of a child does not mean he has grown). This he would say both mocking my height and exuberance. I really wanted us to win this so I can say to him that we did what they could not do. Instead of this, I now resonate more with what he said. We were willing to fight but we were not willing to die and that lacking marked our defeat to a government that has returned us to our knees, to the rhetoric of a blurry hope, of an uncertain future. Somehow I wished that the President’s speech was met with bold fury, with boiling aggression and even stiffer resilience. To do that is to be prepared for the worse and to be prepared for worse is to choose death— but we are not willing to die. I make no blames l and I see no cowardice here. For if life is what we fear for, it is as good a justification to be afraid, as any. A coward who lives to fight another day has not just a chance to life but a chance to win. Victory is not in immediacy.
But will we ever see victory in our time? Are we the generation to break the headlock of madness Nigeria is trapped in? Maybe tomorrow I will have answers to my questions. For today, let me mourn, because if you beat a child, expect him to cry.
