“When sorrows come, they come not single spies, but in battalions,” William Shakespeare wrote in Hamlet (Act IV, Scene 5). Long before Shakespeare, the Greek tragedians had warned that when a state loses its moral balance, suffering ceases to be an accident and becomes a national destiny. In Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, a plague descended on Thebes because leadership failed. In our own Nigeria today, terror stalks everywhere because of a leadership that talks and talks and plays politics.
Citizen Michael Oyedokun chose one of the noblest careers in life. He elected to be a teacher. Teachers are molders of characters and shapers of humanity. They are the ones who take children from the cradle, refine them and make them good ornaments that the world celebrates.
Oyedokun was not just a teacher. He was a core-subject teacher. He taught one of the most difficult subjects an average student like yours sincerely dreads. Mathematics is nobody’s mate! Our Form Five mathematics teacher, a Bendelite, Mr. Okosodin, once asked how I became the Senior Prefect with my not-too-good (or was it non-existent) grades in the subject – may the good Lord forgive him. Oyedokun was good at the subject he taught as he guided his students through Simultaneous Equation, the core algebraic technique of elimination.
Then, Nigeria happened to him. He was eliminated! Not by any identical or opposite coefficients, but by a group of felons the Nigerian State had pampered over the years. The mathematician, Oyedokun, was eliminated by decapitation by children who are probably of the same age as the students he taught mathematics before the cruel fate befell him! His was a tragic irony. How a man who used elimination methods to impact knowledge ended up being eliminated in the most gruesome way leaves a sad memory for us to deal with for the rest of our lives!
Those who are strong at heart watched the video of the decapitation of Oyedokun. I could not bring myself to behold the gory event. I was only strong enough to watch the video of the woman principal who was kidnapped alongside some students, pleading for the government to come to the aid of the victims. The only question I kept asking is: how did we get here?
The mathematics teacher did not commit any crime. He did not engage in any blasphemy, and was not tried, convicted and sentenced by any Sharia court. His only crime was that he chose to be noble in life by earning a living through teaching. Then he was captured, not at the battlefield, but in the classroom, where he was working mathematical sums.
Oyedokun had no chance to escape. In captivity, he must have pleaded for mercy like other captives. His allocutus fell on deaf ears. His captors needed to show the flat-footed government that they meant business. To show that ‘strength’, the depraved minds chose only one way: summary execution of the victim.
And like the Greek god, Gorgon Medusa, who was beheaded before the Greek demigod hero, Perseus, Oyedokun had his head severed. He had no chance to bid family and relations farewell. As the blade penetrated into his skin, cutting the veins and getting to the oesophagus, the mathematics teacher must have wondered where the State was at that moment.
What a pity! There was no way the State would have come to his rescue. Oyedokun and the handlers of our State were not suffering the same ailment at that moment. While the brutally murdered teacher was thinking about his life, the politicians who are in charge of the State were busy doing political permutations that would eventually lead to the elimination of all oppositions towards the 2027 general election!
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This is the Nigerian State for all of us. The country is already in the forest of the wicked (Igbó Òdájú). Our husbands across the levels of government had already entered the election mode before Oyedokun’s decapitation took place. In the scale of preference, the 2027 election takes precedence over Oyedokun’s safety and life. Theirs is politics first and other things afterwards.
The saddest aspect of this is that Oyedokun is not the only victim of our decayed system. Like him, we are all decapitated. He is even better off in that he is dead and out of the current pain in the land. The dead do not play pun roles (òkú kìí sin’gbà), our elders say. The living are the ones who don’t know what will happen next and are worried. The dead have nothing to worry about
There is a saying among the elders of our land: Kò di ìgbà tí ènìyàn bá kú ló tó kú (It is not when a man dies that he is dead). With the level of insecurity in the land, we are all living dead! We fade away by the seconds because we don’t know what fate has in stock for us.
I was on the Benin-Owo Road over the weekend. The road, an inter-state one, is a Trunk A road. Save for the few patching here and there by the Federal Road Maintenance Agency (FERMA), there is nothing to show any federal presence on the road.
The road, over the years, holds the trophy for kidnapping notoriety! Mentally, as I drove along the lonely road, I could picture the spots where people had been kidnapped in the past. As I approached any of those hot spots, the ‘spirit’ ministered to me that I could be the next victim! The thought became worrisome as I drove without any other private car overtaking me till I got to Oluku, the Benin end of the road.
There were countless security posts on the way. Five or so of such posts were manned by soldiers; the rest by policemen. Of course, only the military posts had their vehicles positioned for immediate action with a soldier behind the wheel while the rest stood at strategic positions.
What about the posts manned by the policemen? We should not discuss that here. If clumsiness were to be a concept for graphic arts, those police posts are living examples. The ‘officers’ only sprang into action whenever a vehicle approached the post by a few metres. And nothing serious happened. All one gets is just a peep into the car and a wave of hand for the driver to move on.
I checked and I saw no vehicle that could convey them for action in case something untoward happened. How would they respond to any distress call when the armed men are as immobile as a congenital lame?! Yet, someone posted them on that lonely road ‘to beef up security.’ Somewhere else, another person signs off the teller for their logistics. Probably too, there are ledgers and vouchers for fuelling and vehicle maintenance expenses, which the accounts department pays regularly!
Until I saw the Nigeria Institute for Oil Palm research (NIFOR) signage by the road, the fear of being kidnapped did not go away. If I had checked into any hospital as I entered Benin City, I had no doubt what my Blood Pressure would have read. I also want to believe that I was not the only commuter that Sunday morning who nursed the same sense of foreboding. Nigerians, all over the country, travel on the nation’s highways as dead but living beings!
From Ilu Abo, a short distance to Akure, the capital of Ondo State, to Sobe and Odigitue in Edo State, to Imope in Ogun State, kidnappers’ activities are no longer limited to the highways. I heard stories and met one or two acquaintances of victims who were kidnapped in their homes. A particular woman, I was told, came down from the car to open the house gate for her husband who was behind the wheel. She noticed that some men were dragging the gate with her. On a closer look, she discovered that she was surrounded by some gunmen and before she could open her mouth to shout for help, she had been whisked into a get-away-car. The unfortunate woman, a civil servant, only saw her family again days later after a N10 million ransom had been paid.
Yet in that neighbourhood, another couple was taking ‘fresh air’ outside their living room because of the excruciating heat caused by lack of electricity supply. Suddenly, some gun-wielding young men showed up and marched them out of their home into the forest. From Owo forest, the victims were taken through the bush to a place in Kwara State. Again, ransom, running into millions of Naira was paid before they gained freedom.
So, like the esoteric leaf of Agbaa tree, which finds no peace either in the house or on the road, Nigerians have become victims of untraceable insecurity that spares no one and no religion. Kidnappers and other felons holding the nation bound to violence have become like the legendary deity that takes over the house, the stream and the farm from us (Òòsà tó gba’lé, gbo’dò, tó tún gbo’ko l’ówó eni). Nowhere is safe; no sanctuary is too sacred for them to invade. Not even the presence of God, whom we call upon in times of distress.
A few days ago, around the Ikiran community of Kwara State, a group of worshippers observing a night prayer meeting were attacked by kidnappers. By the time the dust settled, three of the ‘prayer warriors’ were killed and 15 others taken into captivity. One begins to wonder what the government is doing about the insecurity in Kwara State! Is there really a government in that state or why have bad tales become two for a penny in the state?
But more importantly, why are the people in that locality not circumspect? Which prayer meeting would anybody organise in that axis given the frequency with which kidnappers operate in the area? Why would the government not regulate such large gatherings, especially at night, when it is common knowledge that those notorious men have a penchant to attack crowded environments where they can kidnap scores at a time?
If the Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN), the Pentecostal Fellowship of Nigeria (PFN) and other religious bodies would not take the initiative and be discretionary in their order of services and activities, why would the government not act on their behalf? Why anyone would gather a large number of people on a mountain for prayers dragging till 8.00pm in a security-prone environment like Ikiran and the neighbouring towns and villages beats one’s imagination! Did the organisers of the Ikiran prayer meeting not read in the Bible in Ecclesiastes 10:10 that: “Wisdom is profitable to direct?”
I hold nothing against people organising prayer sessions. As a matter of fact, if there is any time Nigeria needs prayers and God’s divine intervention, it is now. However, one needs to be discretionary. Our husbands in power, from the local government chairmen to the president have no feelings for us; they are just not bothered! We can die in our thousands and be kidnapped in our hundreds; our leaders’ preoccupation at the moment is the 2027 elections!
The latest Kwara Kidnap incident was avoidable. It had no reason to happen but for lack of discretion on the part of the organisers. It is time the leadership of the various faiths came together to redesign their programmes. There is no wisdom where people deliberately offer themselves as sacrifices in the name of prayer meetings. Wisdom, again, is profitable to direct!
The views expressed by contributors are strictly personal and not of Law & Society Magazine.
