Nigeria: Of Bastards And Legitimates

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.