Just think of the horrors this woman endured for an entire night in the hands of this excuse of a man because of this amount. It makes me so ashamed that the litany of failures of my country led to and enabled this kind of behaviour.
Let me paint the scenario for you once again, dear reader. Recently, there was a story in the newspapers that a widow was allegedly raped to death over the night by a man somewhere in Ebonyi State. If this story is true, it means, dear reader, Mrs. Ogodo Egede, 34, of Egwudunagu village in Amachi community literally spent her most horrendous, longest and last night in the hands of a senseless, low-level, hideous and heartless male assailant who brutalised her mercilessly throughout the night. What was her offence? She owed him 1,500 Naira and could not pay.
Since the story broke, unfortunately, not many Nigerians have been able to keep their level of indignation high enough. Rather, all of the nation’s indignation has gone into upbraiding Buhari for appointing mostly northerners to fill national offices. Only the police have been left to sigh, heave up and haul the brutish philistine to join his kith and ilk in custody.
I cannot get over the shock though. I cannot get over the shock that something, anything that pretends to go in the shape of a human being can take another something, anything that goes in the same name and subject it/him/her to such a long and horrendous violation. Worse, I cannot get over the shock that Nigerians are not screaming blue murder and demanding the swiftest judgment over that reprobate. I am in shock that we all who go by the name Nigerians have failed this soul and are going about our normal business castigating the president as usual.
Oh yes, we all failed her. To start with, while this woman was going through this atrocious and horrific experience in the hands of her appalling assaulter, most of us were…. asleep, while some were… making money… yeah well, making something anyway. So we’ve got her on our collective conscience as a nation and as individuals, though some more than others. The question we should be asking ourselves is what could have brought a widow to the point that she could not offset a debt of N1,500 and had to pay with her life? This is more pathetic when you consider that this is a country where leaders use champagne to brush their teeth and wash down yesterday’s beer and then sniff all kinds of costly things with the money that could have kept this woman alive.
We could start with the fact that she is a widow which means that her husband failed her by dying. That can’t be helped; as they say, when you gotta go, you gotta go. In saner climes, that fact alone normally invites sympathy and offers of help, but not to our assailant. In place of sympathy, he offered brutality. The woman’s own father was also said not to have helped much. As the story went, the woman’s daughter fled to her grandfather that night and told him what was going on in their house but the man did not raise hell or rouse the village to help his daughter. He has his reasons, but let’s move on.
What about her councilman and LGA chairman? Oh yes, they also failed her. Can you imagine the colossal amount of money that have been released into each LGA in this country but which have not been used to make life a little more comfortable for the people? Perhaps, if those monies had been judiciously used, factories could by now be dotting the landscapes of Nigeria, rural and all, and Mrs. Egede could by now be holding down a job of a sort that would at least pay enough to keep her out of the claws of heartless monsters.
Now, add to that list her State Assemblyman, Federal Representative and Senator, all of who have been too busy fighting to be put on one juicy committee or the other to know what is going on in their constituencies. True, they cannot be expected to know all those who ‘voted’ them in. They can at least know and intervene in the plights of vulnerable groups such as widows or children or battered wives or unemployed youths, etc., in their jurisdictions. It is their job and duty so to do.
Our assemblymen should not just limit their sights on the high and mighty offices they are aspiring to. After all, we grant that they are humans still seeking the maturity that will enable them know that all pursuits in this life still end in grand futility, making all our stabbings at life one big grandstanding. Camus said it; Becket said it, to mention a few. For now, let us pretend our assemblymen have not heard it said. Until then, they are entitled to their pursuits. However, they should occasionally lower their sights on the lesser mortals whose problems they are expected to help solve.
The list is not ended, reader. The governors of her state, past and present, and the presidents of the country, past and present, have failed this woman. In their various failures to address the developmental problems of their areas, they assist in throwing the delicate and vulnerable into the waiting hands of the roughnecks and philistines in our midst. When there are no jobs and people have to eke out their living literally with their fingers from a reluctant earth, more vulnerability creeps in and human dignity flies out the window.
Women and children are the most vulnerable groups in any society; but as of now, very few laws have been put in place to protect them. Regularly, widows are battered by kith, kin and others of brutish ilk, and few come to their rescue. But for the gallant youths of this Amachi village who arose as one man and fished out this callous monster for the police, he would have continued to gad gaily about in his father’s compound where he was captured, all on account of state failure.
Please don’t get me wrong. All over the world, people’s wrong choices and bad turns of luck unwittingly place them in the hands of loan sharks, money lenders, blackmailers, pimps, etc., but it is not often that people get this kind of attack for owing N1,500, an amount that is less than $10. So yes, people are being killed daily in the world even for owing less. Yet, just think of the horrors this woman endured for an entire night in the hands of this excuse of a man because of this amount. It makes me so ashamed that the litany of failures of my country led to and enabled this kind of behaviour. These state failures must be addressed because they are killing the citizens.
There are too many examples in Nigerian leadership that are telling the citizens that it is all right Jack; you can take the law into your hands. Just look at your political office holders. It is generally believed that many of them rigged their ways into office and are still using the same mago-mago and wayo-wayo ways to get fixed up into juicy positions. These behaviour patterns kind of tell the general citizens that the means justifies the end and any behaviour that produces desired results is aye o.k.
With that mindset, the country clearly is endangered. We are not preaching morality here. We are rooting for good governance where leaders should know that they are directly and indirectly responsible for the long-term actions of their citizens because they provide the examples to follow. When they fail in their duties, the state fails and the people fall. Mrs. Egede fell because of the failure of her leaders; May her soul rest in peace.
