By Chuks
Iloegbuhnam
Two recent telephone
conversations: My brother called. He was in something of a fix. Opening his
door earlier that morning, there were two 30-litre jerry-cans placed in front
of his house. Who had left them? He didn’t have long to wait for the answer to
his unvoiced question. Our cousin’s wife, who lives in the same estate and
whose husband was out of the country, had left them. She soon surfaced with an
unambiguous request.
“Your generator was
on throughout the night.”
“It was.”
“That means you have
a way of sourcing fuel. Please, don’t come back today without fuel for us!”
“Eh?”
“You can’t beat off
the heat with your electric fans while I suffocate with my children.” The woman
spoke matter-of-factly and returned to her house. What to do? I told my brother
to go find fuel for his household’s further use, and for our cousin’s family
too. He complained that the proposition was far more difficult than it
sounded. But, in my book, that aspect of our conversation was at an end. I was
ready for us to discuss the moon and China .
I later called a
journalist friend of mine. He had just returned from his barber’s, he said. The
barber had doubled the cost of a haircut. When he asked why, the barber responded
with his own question:
“Oga, you no see say
na generator I dey use?” My friend drove home to find his wife frowning by
their open freezer.
“What’s the matter?”
“The fish is
melting.”
“In that case, let’s
put the generator on for an hour while I go out in search of fuel.”
He had brunch and
drove off again. Back after five hours without as much as a pint of petrol, the
generator was still on. Seven minutes later, its fuel tank ran empty and the
poor thing went off.
“As I speak to you
now,” said my friend, “there’s no fuel in the house for anything. None for
fighting the intense heat. We can’t even afford the luxury of watching the La
Liga tonight. What gives me the jitters, however, is the contingency of my
wife’s fish going bad; that will earn me some roasting.”
*Chuks Iloegbunam |
I sympathized with my
friend, and advised that he detailed his experiences in his next column,
leaving out, of course, any aspects that may, even if vaguely, suggest that
his wife was something of the authority on the domestic front.
The next story is
about someone who got fuel all right but, against his will and the desire of
his family, paid with the expensive currency of his life. The price was
uncritically extortionate and raises afresh the whole question of the place of
the human being in contemporary Nigerian society.
The following report,
by numerous online publications, came from Festac
Town , Lagos , on April 6, 2016: “The lingering fuel
crisis has claimed a life as a female staff of the Nigerian Security and Civil
Defence Corp (NSCDC) shot dead a boy at the AP Filling Station on 21 Road.
“The boy was alleged
to have bought fuel in jerry cans and was going home when he was accosted by a
team of Civil Defence officials who arrested him. The boy who should be about
18 years old was said to have laid down on the road pleading with the Corps members
to allow him to go home, as he was not a fuel hawker but had just bought fuel
for personal use.
“Eyewitnesses said
the Commander of the team who felt that the boy was resisting arrest, ordered
a female official to shoot the “Bastard” and the woman obeyed his order and
shot him. On seeing the boy dying in the pool of his blood, the Corps members
zoomed off in their patrol van.
“As at press time,
men of the enhanced military patrol tagged “OP Mesa” and the Nigeria Police
led by the Festac Police Station Divisional Police Officer (DPO) Monday
Agbonika were on the ground, making sure that the angry mob did not take the
laws into their own hands.
“The angry
sympathizers had attempted to set the filling station and some petrol tankers
ablaze but were prevented by the security operatives. A senior police officer
who spoke on condition of anonymity said the killing of the young boy was
unwarranted.
‘‘Why should they
kill the boy? I think the Civil Defence doesn’t know when to use firearms;
they don’t even have regulation on firearms usage.’
“The Lagos State
Police Command spokesman, Dolapo Badmos, who confirmed the incident, said that
the Police was investigating the matter with a view to fishing out the Civil
Defence personnel who committed the act and prosecuting them in the law
court.”
The Civil Defence
officers abandoned the boy they had shot dead and zoomed off! Who did they
expect to clear their mess? Also, something new is self-evident. If people
previously entertained only suspicions, the Civil Defence commander in Festac Town
finally confirmed the composition of Nigerians as legitimates and bastards.
The legitimates are armed to the teeth and, like poachers in a games reserve,
are running around gunning down bastards indiscriminately. But, until recent
times, it wasn’t spelt out that bastardy was a capital offence.
There’s another
consideration. An unidentified Police officer questioned the Civil Defence’s
knowledge on gun usage. In fact, he wondered if any regulations guided their
use of lethal weapons. The murdered boy had not committed any offence known to
Nigerian law, let alone an offence punishable by summary execution, without
any form of trial. The bastard was sadistically shot dead at pointblank range,
despite the fact that he was rolling on the ground, pleading for mercy.
In some societies,
this outrage by the Civil Defence Corps should lead to a thorough review of
their arms-bearing circumstances. But, the problem of Nigerians – or more
appropriately, the problem of Nigerian Bastards – has not been only at the
hands of the Civil Defence. All other gun-bearing services are into this
indiscriminate poaching of ‘bastards’. A DSS officer recently shot and killed
a voter in Nasarawa
State , at pointblank
range and without provocation. As for the regular Armed Forces, the Shi’a in Zaria and Biafran
agitators are severely bloodied patches on their slates.
It all leads to the
fundamentals. Official wantonness is a needless invitation to the chaos of
backlashes. Again, Nigerian commentators often audit governments on their
performances regarding mundane things like power supply, availability of
petroleum products, the provision of jobs and the creation of the feel-good
factor. Needless to add that these are critical areas in which the current
dispensation has so far posted mind-numbing failures, for which it has
consistently blamed every other entity but it bumbling self.
Yet, the most
important barometer for measuring a government’s worth ought to be the amount
of premium it places on human life. Any society with the apparent or inherent
dichotomy of Legitimates and Bastards, in which the former mindlessly plunders
and murders the latter, execrates political leadership.
*Mr. Chuks Iloegbunam, an eminent essayist, journalist and author of several books, writes column on the back page of The Authority newspaper every Tuesday.
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