Crocodile Tears For Victims Of Preventable Accidents

By Andrew Erakhrumen

What used to be unexpected tragedies in the past gradually became clearly regularly expected, unpreventable, acceptable and accepted “disaster-in-waiting” because of past and present governments’ non-responsiveness and irresponsibility coupled with the followers’ complacency, unseriousness, inability, and/or refusal, to confront collective challenges; and when these ‘expected’ disasters occur, all that is done is the predictable, regular, short-lived, mostly valueless, unproductive, mechanical public uproar that dies almost immediately as it starts!

This has always been the pattern and those in government are perfectly aware of it! After all, they are supposed to be from amongst Nigerians! Then, are we – as Nigerians – a serious people? This informed our opinion, concerning the 12-year-old Sylvester Oromoni Jnr., whose death occurred on November 30, 2021, that “...it was as if the ‘unusual’ happened. 

Let Me Breathe, I Don’t Want To Die!

 By Owei Lakemfa

Two different but related cries ring in my head. “Let the Poor breathe” and “I don’t want to die.” The first is the cry across the country as the masses are being suffocated by inflation and over 90 million poor get hungrier.

*Dr. Vwaere Diaso

The second is the plaintive cry of young medical doctor, Vwaere Diaso, whose calling is to save lives. However, when her life was in danger with her limbs broken by an heartless system, her blood flowing from various parts and she knew her life was ebbing and she desperately needed help, her dying cry to her colleagues was: “I don’t want to die.”