February 2017. A pretty, young girl blew up in Muna Dalti. She was a casualty of fear, the terror that makes us bestial. There were corn rows on the head of the girl bomber. There was a colourful bead on her wrist too. She probably loved to play dress-up and look good. Everybody forgets these bits of her.
Folk remember her as the ‘vixen’ who flicked a switch and blew up, into a puddle of flesh and bone fragments. No one cares if she was ever innocent or raised in virtue. The village is thankful that she took no innocent life, save her teenage accomplice’s. Their carcass lay strewn about the rustic community in Maiduguri, Borno State. Their innards and blood spatter sully the village even as you read.
Viewing her in the dust few metres from her shredded mate, the girl with the cornrows evoked the dread that wild weeds induce at the base of shoots. Two hours after her ‘sister’ and agent of a terrorist group, Boko Haram, detonated an Improvised Explosive Device (IED) at the Muna vehicle park, injuring eight people and burning 13 freight trucks, the girl with the cornrows sauntered into Muna Dalti with another ‘sister’ to explode among soft targets.
Till date, nobody knows the names of the girls that blew up in Muna Dalti but several folk would remember Maryam Alhaji-Wakil in whom the girl died on a sunlit afternoon in Bama. That fateful day in 2014, Boko Haram insurgents invaded her town and burnt her home. They killed her relatives and decapitated her neighbours. Then they abducted her. She was nine years old.
Maryam’s abductors whisked her to Sambisa Forest, their terror enclave. There, she was forcibly married to Modu, a ‘violent’ member of the sect. In two days, little Maryam was violently thrust into womanhood. Modu, 35, forced his way into her unripe orifice, robbing her of innocence and the mystic pleasure of first adult sexual experience. Modu was hasty and rough thus making her ‘first time’ bestial and replete with pain. She screamed in agony but Modu didn’t care. “The louder I screamed, the more violently he shoved into me until I passed out,” she told me in an exclusive interview.
When she came to, the nine-year-old from Bama had transformed into a broken woman in the corpse of a child.
Cut to a fresh hodgepodge of bloodshed and mayhem perpetrated in Benue, from dusk through dawn and you have a perfect picture of terror afflicting the Nigerian State.
Contrary to widespread belief, the terror we face are hardly the podgy, covetous creatures we ennoble with public office and the Nigerian till; true terror lives in the Nigerian youth. The contemporary youth is both a victim and perpetrator of terror.
January 2018 till date; season of the funeral pyre. Hundreds are hacked to death weekly, on the pretext of herdsmen vs. host communities’ crisis. In the wake of the genocide, public officers and politicians of the ruling party trade blame with opposition. They play to the gallery.
At the backdrop of their shenanigans, poor, helpless kids like Maryam and the butchered residents of Benue lose their lives.
Irrational brick bats, unbelievable platitudes and senseless bloodshed have shaped our politics for too long. Many Nigerians, youth in particular, are probably living through the worst decade of their lives. They read of bloody genocides at dawn, poverty and strife in the next city – many more live through such. And as usual, an economy patched with foreign loans and dubious tales of growth. If Nigeria is prospering, it hasn’t manifested in the lives of the citizenry.
It took a perfect gathering of bad leadership to get to this moment. It would take electing an imperfect cannonball of a man or woman to brave through it and survive it. It’s about time Nigeria’s youth elected men of uncommon grit and fibre into public offices.
Come 2019, what we should be interested in are candidates, president-elect in particular, capable of fostering policies that would generate employment, a functional health sector and an educational system capable of providing the skilled manpower that Nigeria needs to power her industry.
If the youth are gainfully employed, they won’t become vulnerable to criminal masterminds using them to foment mayhem. Today is spitting out monsters and tomorrow portends the emergence of a thousand more ogres.
What Nigeria needs at the moment are youth driven by moral courage to change the status quo; by influencing change beneficial to all. Moral courage encompasses the nerve to do the right thing and speak the truth always. It involves defying the mob as a solitary individual; to spurn the invigorating embrace of comradeship; to be disobedient to authority, even at the risk of your life, for a higher principle.
And with moral courage comes persecution and any other form of repercussion that exposes the individual as a defenseless mark to be preyed upon. Gani Fawehinmi had moral courage, so did Malcolm X. Predictably, advocates of such morality are either maligned by fate or ascribed rogue status by the state. Routinely they are accused and charged for treason.
But in their touted notoriety subsists the irony of an incontrovertible metaphor; they usually represent the best of mankind and civilization in their time.
Come 2019, the youth should root for a candidate identifiable as the window into the Nigerian psyche. The one who internalises the grief he has learnt from the streets. I speak of the candidate that manifests as the blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes can rally to project their dreams and needs; the passive yet active instrument by which Nigeria may prosper and we could achieve our dreams.
To find such a candidate, the search begins now. None of the current contenders is worthy of the Nigerian vote. If Nigeria recycles them in power, the world that awaits us would be more painful and difficult.
