SIR: The night has finally enveloped Rivers State, while darkness overpowered light and every sense of illumination therein. Goodness has taken flight in the ever buzzing Garden City, while rationality, level-headedness disappeared into Rivers thin air.
How can a discerning mind dissect, decipher and subsequently, digest the orgy and cacophony of violence trailing Rivers State legislative re-run elections – where a number of citizens – both in uniform and civil-regalia were simply and gruesomely murdered in search of political powers?
Where can we place last Saturday’s incidences in Rivers State, where a Police DSP (Alkali Mohammed) and his orderly where beheaded, and five policemen declared missing? How do we situate a state election where four personnel of the Nigerian Security and Civil Defence Corps (NSCDC) were killed and their weapons carted away by thugs and hoodlums?
How do we quantify an election that was laced with explosions of all manners, abductions of NYSC members who the country co-opted into helping INEC to conduct efficient elections and other matters?
Rivers last election was one baggage, too many. It was the greatest show of sham and shame the country ever superintended and participated in. It is the height of barbarism, crass and class ignorance in this part of the earth. It was our worst-ever show-biz in democratic practices, as well as our journey to civility.
The world must have been dazed, utterly disappointed and astounded since coming out of that election. They would have been wondering if we quite understand what an election or democracy simply means. The globe would have dissociated themselves from the disgraceful dance and desecration of sanctity of human life in Rivers in the name of elections.
In all these, the culprits are politicians – the desperadoes and the unrepentant. The do or die agents are usually the unseen hands behind the asinine things anytime, here. They were the reason behind those lifeless bodies, which blood flowed from, with those tears and sorrow inflicted on a nation, no one else.
They assembled and grouped the callous and unleash them on everybody in sight. They employ and hire the evil doers to kill and destroy their traducers. And then, then go back to their homes to watch their fore-paid events take place as agreed with their field marshals whose only stock in trade is to maim.
But malevolence must not subsist here. There should always be a limit to which heartbreaks should be allowed to happen in the country. Evil and its doers must be made to observe checkpoints and punitive measures in the nation, and not the reverse, where the depraved reign supreme today.
Wickedness must not be carried out at will by its harbingers and merchants at ease any longer. People must be made to pay for taking another’s life as the law guaranteeing the rights to life stipulates. That aspect of the country’s legal framework must be observed in strict compliance as to ensure sanity in one’s relation to another.
Things can no longer be taken for granted here if indeed, an “injustice to one remains an injustice to all.” The federal government in working consonance with the security agencies must leave no stone unturned in making sure the killers of its citizenry in the last Rivers electoral contest are caught and punished accordingly, in line with its avowal to protect lives, as that would renew the faith of Nigerians in the ability of government to protect its population.
The Nigerian populace on the other hand, must resist being used by politicians to achieve their selfish interests before, during and after electoral contests. We must defy becoming a chess-ball in the hands of these politicians.
- Gwiyi Solomon,
Abuja.
