Life as a “chosen pawn” is no walk in the park. Your heart is thick with repentance, but your penance has no audience. Perhaps because your chosen idols have counted you as part of the sacrifice.
Your date with epiphany begins with promise. Pardon the recap in real time. On January 1st, the Year of Retribution, at precisely 8:40 am, you are ushered into a media parley at the “captured” State House in Abuja. You have rehearsed “appreciable” questions for the occupying force’s spokesman and the Commander of the counter-insurgency, aka Operation Chosen Lion.
Your wit is honed to impress, and your conscience, neatly folded like a newspaper back copy. But few hours into the propaganda parley, you are briefed that resistance fighters had breached the perimeters of the north central’s open-air prison. You are told they are being crushed and pushed back.
You applaud the newly constituted God’s Chosen Army for its daring and professionalism, stressing that Nigeria’s former military “would have caved and taken to their heels.”
The Commander beams appreciatively at you – glorying in your impassioned sycophancy – while your colleagues rue their inability to beat you to the butt-lick and crawl. Eventually, you are discharged with a handsome reimbursement for your time.
Sometime between your take-off and ascent to the FCT skyline, you learn that God’s Chosen forces are battling resistance fighters close to your residential district in Lagos. But you can neither call nor text, in compliance with aviation rules.
Instantly, you become hysterical, wondering if your home has been caught in the carnage. As your plane descends astride the southwest perimeters of Nigeria’s open-air prison, you become anxious about the fate of your family amid the onslaught. But you’ve been assured, after all, that you would always be spared any of God’s Chosen military assault, given your relocation outside the internment camps.
As you get closer to your neighbourhood, you are turned back by God’s Chosen special forces combing through for fleeing rebels. In your hysteria, you receive a call from your wife’s phone. ‘Thank God, they made it out before the siege,” you mutter. You are relieved to hear your seven-year-old daughter at the end of the line.
But she is pleading over the phone for you to come rescue her. You hear shots being fired, drowning out your daughter’s screams. And then, silence.
You hear nothing of your family until two weeks later, following the withdrawal of God’s Chosen forces from the area. Your daughter’s body was found alongside five others: your wife and four other daughters, inside your family car, a Kia Picanto.
Satellite images reveal how they were targeted by heavy artillery and run over by God’s Chosen army tanks. Your family car got riddled by exactly 335 bullets, and you can barely recognise your seven-year-old daughter, her sisters and your wife, from their severely mangled corpses.
In your grief, you recall your mockery of the sad fate of a six-year-old Palestinian girl, Hind Rajab. On January 29, 2024, in Gaza City, Hind Rajab pleaded over the phone for emergency workers to rescue her from a car riddled with bullets. Her body was found two weeks later, on February 10, 2024, alongside the bodies of six of her family members in the car they drove to flee their neighbourhood as Israeli forces invaded.
Picture your daughter in the mangled carcass of Hind Rijab. Picture her as the bloody carcass of each murdered Palestinian newborn and toddler. Suddenly, it’s not so witty or “touche” anymore to write, “Play stupid games, win stupid prizes” in response to social media outrage to the genocide in Gaza. “How about October 7?” now resonates like a dumb riposte.
You realise how dubious it was of you to write the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from October 7. Yet, your grief manifests as ghosts of your past hypocrisies. Each bullet in each of your family members resonates as a headline that once mocked the suffering of others. The irony is pungent, the poetry unbearable.
You had gone to report on “order” as directed by God’s Chosen leadership, and broadcast “balance” effected through carpet-bombs. You drafted your editorial masterpiece right before you left the God’s Chosen media parley, telling your fellow Nigerians that the occupying force was grossly misunderstood; that their tanks were moral instruments deployed in a siege against anarchists masquerading as resistance fighters.
You quoted the scriptures to justify bombardments, as though God moonlighted as a munitions dealer. In your voice, objectivity becomes fiction, crafted according to the designs of those who rewrite history with the blood of others. It isn’t true if it’s not just. And justice requires choosing sides; always against annihilation.
Now, faced with your family’s execution, your knees collapse. As you grieve, you see your colleagues still live-tweeting God’s Chosen propaganda and competing for soundbites. Their eyes avoid yours. They will file their reports and sleep. And you, broken father, will write one last column, perhaps a confession or a curse. But it will come too late for your daughter.
Now, you attempt the literature of rebellion, but your voice has lost its vigour, like a redundant hyperbole in a rant against God’s Chosen. Eventually, you collapse in the wreckage of your own rhetoric, your press badge dangling like a noose of your own design.
It takes a special kind of maleficence, and insolence perhaps, to rejoice at the murder of infants. Those who justify sniper bullets in the head of a three-year-old abroad may welcome sniper bullets in the head of their child or grandchild. Karma comes full circle, always.
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You find that, not even a swift recourse to frantic remorse, could make heaven spare you your just deserts. You are accountable for your secret lusts and espoused chaos. The goodness you espouse will make you; the evil you applaud will unmake you.
Forget Deir Yassin, Sabra, Shatila, Jenin, Khan Younis. Forget the siege, the deathly checkpoints, and the snipers who target children. Forget the journalists who got buried with their cameras alongside their families. Forget starvation, too, because remembrance is rebellion.
And now, in the same logic of convenience, you will forget your heartfelt losses as you parrot God’s Chosen phrases: “security operation,” “neutralised threats,” and “collateral damage.” You will sanitise massacre into lexicon as your coloniser’s grammar becomes your creed, and your craft, once meant to awaken, now anesthetises.
Gaza was an experiment. The world watched it burn and called it geopolitics. It watched children being vaporised and called it defence. It watched truth die and called it complexity.
The same logic is rehearsing for its Nigerian debut. Every dollar grant that demands ideological loyalty and silence from your newsroom prepares you for future occupation. Every journalist who flatters tyranny abroad must prepare to relive it soon in his native dialect.
And when the performance begins, and the skies darken with imported drones and a colonist pall, both your patriotism and humanity will be tested.
Every God’s Chosen pawn has a price. What’s yours? A dollar grant? A travel visa? Or an opportunity to relocate your family abroad?
These days, the Nigerian newsroom objectively debates everything but the daily savagery depicted in Gaza. Journalists fear the rancour that may arise. But, I want to say to dear colleagues, in the poetic tenor of Stephanie Hollington-Sawyer, can we not be sad together at the descent of humanity? Can we not grieve the death of innocents? Can we not at least mourn together?
