ALUU FOUR-WHAT I LEARNT
On the 6th of October, I logged into my Facebook account to update my status. I also wanted to see what my friends had on their minds. The first thing I saw was the grisly video of the lynching of four Uniport students, Ugunna Obuzor, Lloyd Toku, Tekena Elkanah and Chiadaka Odinga which took place on the 5th of October in Omuokiri, one of the nine villages that make up Aluu community. Facebook was awash with the story and in our usual citizen journalism, everybody was busy posting the videos on their status. For days, the information circulated on the net. Nigerians lamented, cried, and cursed the perpetrators of the evil act. People wrote poems, dirges, and songs for the victims. I am sure our creative movie industry, Nollywood would soon cash in on the barbarous act. We have done our bit and gone back to our usual daily routines. Life continues! However, I learnt the following.
We are quick to arrive at conclusions without facts at our disposal. On Facebook, some folks supported the mob action; they quickly decided the boys deserved the terrible injustice meted to them. They learnt the students were thieves; they allegedly stole phones and laptops. Therefore, they deserved to die without the benefit of a proper trial. These Facebook judges approved the jungle justice meted on the unfortunate boys. One did not need to be told that if the Facebook judges were at the scene, they would have participated in the killings. One striking thing was that all these happened when the real information about the supposed crimes of the boys was still sketchy. It was just a day after the lynching and we were been updated as versions of the incident were coming in snippets. It later turned out that the boys (two of them were budding musicians) were on a mission to collect a bad debt and the debtor raised a false alarm for reasons best known to
him which culminated in the death of those boys. The method the Uniport four employed to collect the said debt may not be in good taste as alleged but it is evident they were not given the opportunity to defend themselves. The hasty verdict of the Facebook individuals was unanimous with that of the people of Omuokiri-Aluu when they responded to the false and mischievous alarm of the said debtor. The killers lost their sense of reasoning in a spur of madness.
The extrajudicial murder occurred in a predominantly Christian environment. What does this tell us? For many of us, religion is a tradition. Some of us go to church because we were born in a Christian setting. For them, it is a weekly gathering where amongst other things; they go to rub minds with people they do not see during the week because of daily activities. It is where they go to show off their clothes, cars, jewelries, expensive phones, Ipads and probably new dance steps. That is the reason they ping, chat, Facebook and engage in several other things while service is on. They even steal money and valuables belonging to their brethren right there in church without remorse. The weekly sermons do not sink into their thick skulls for many reasons. What sermons anyway? What they are taught is the gospel of materialism and miracles by the gospelpreneurs in charge of the churches. Nigeria is probably one of the few countries with churches at every
corner of the street, with everybody calling himself pastor, bishop, evangelist, and any other name that catches the person's fancy. The people who took part in snuffing out the lives of the boys were Christians. They conveniently forgot the following Bible injunctions, which says, “Thou shall not kill” and “love your neighbor as yourself”. Most of us who call ourselves Christians are devilish, and we have no atom of human feelings in us. We condemn the terrorist group, Boko Haram, but we do worse when given a little opportunity. We mouth the name of God when it suites us but we commit atrocities that would make the devil doff his hat for us.
Our phones are powerful tools of information dissemination. They are part of the new media. With these gadgets and the internet, we become emergency journalists. That means we can reports events as they occur. The internet is now the fastest means of passing information and news to people at lightning speed. Most people learnt of the gruesome murder of the students through the internet before the traditional media (newspapers) published it. It is this pervasive nature of the new media (the internet) in our lives that serious newspapers now have online editions and there are also purely online newspapers like Saharareporters.com, Pointblanknews.com, Premiumtimes.com, Newsdiaryonline.com and a host of others too numerous to be mentioned. We can help in solving crimes anywhere we are just by simply taking pictures and recording events with phones that have the capacity for it. That however does not mean that one should stand by and watch an injustice been
done. There is a joke that Nigerians in the craze to be the first to post an incident on the net would rather record an accident scene and the dying victims instead of helping them out. The same way they will stay back and record people fighting on the street or any other situation where they can easily intervene. I learnt that when the Dana plane crash occurred earlier this year, the first set of people that got there were content with recording the scene with their phones rather than looking for means of saving the victims before they got burnt. That is how bad it has become. That is what happened in Omuokiri- Aluu, if the people who recorded the inhuman and cannibalistic act had intervened or pleaded for the lives of those boys, they would be alive today. However, to them it was breaking news to be recorded and posted on Facebook, Twitter, Youtube and other social media. It was a video to be transferred to friends and relatives that were not at the
scene to watch the show with them. A video for posterity, to be watched at their leisure, probably when having drinks and they would say, I was there when it happened, I recorded it. The people who recorded the incident are sick, the nuts in their heads are not in the right places, and I believe they should be examined by a psychiatric. People should learn to be their brother's keeper. I know that those emergency photojournalists would have kept their phones aside if it were their brothers that were at the receiving end that day. They would have fought to see them rescued and taken to a police station.
Nigeria is gradually turning to a barbaric country where human lives are no longer valued. Even animals have more respect for themselves than we do for ourselves. We have become so used to seeing people die like chicken everyday in our society through the bombs of the terrorist group, Boko Haram, on our death traps called roads, extra judicial killings by the security forces, political assassinations, in the hands of armed robbers, kidnappers, cultists in our schools, and other premature deaths that we have lost respect for the sanctity of life. Our society today fits squarely into the Thomas Hobbs theory of state of nature where life is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”. We take laws in to our hands and snuff out lives which we cannot create. We have become judges and decide when people should exit from earth without a proper trial. That is why adults and children of both sexes and different ages as we see in the pictures and video of
the Uniport four gleefully cheered up the people who murdered those boys in a heartless manner. They were spectators in an arena while the poor students were their gladiators with no weapons to defend themselves. They clapped, laughed, and whooped for joy while their champions (the killers) bashed the four boys to death with various weapons. Anyway, all who participated in the macabre act are killers. The people who took pictures and videos with their phones, who praised and encouraged the killers and who brought the sticks, stones and tires, fuel and matches that were used on the boys contributed in the killing. It does not matter if they raised a hand on them or not. There is a saying in my place that a person who picks a stick for a lunatic is also part of the lunatic's activity. The act of killing is now a sport here, which is why we kill at every little provocation and for very mundane reasons. That is why the killers of the Mubi students had a
list of people to exterminate and had the leisure of calling the names of their victims as they finished them off. That is why two boys happily strangled an innocent girl, Cynthia Osokogu in a Lagos hotel over peanuts. The incident that occurred on October 5th is not new. It started long ago; there are places where it has become a part of daily life. Some years ago, during the reign of the Bakassi boys in Aba, killing of people was a sport at busy junctions in daylight. The only difference was that people did not have access to the internet as they have now to post pictures and videos. Unfortunately, extrajudicial killings of this sort will not end with those students because we are a society that has become bloodthirsty and we cannot change.
Nigerians do not believe in their judicial system and the police. This is because of the cash and carry system in the judiciary and the police force where criminals gain freedom for a fee. Once you have money, you can pay for your freedom no matter the crime committed as long as the judiciary and the police are concerned. Moreover, there are lawyers to help those you wriggle out successful no matter the atrocity committed. The police for a fee will even tell you the person responsible for your arrest in the first place. It is that bad. The people do not believe in the police and the judiciary again to help in dispensing justice. This is why you hear someone who has a dispute with his neighbor say “he called police for me so that I will spend money”. The murderers of those students did not believe the police would have gotten to the root of the matter in a fair manner. They therefore took the law into their hands. If you want to know how the judicial
system runs in our society then read the article by Olusegun Adeniyi, a columnist with Thisday newspapers entitled “insured by the mafia”.
The Omuokiri-Aluu people that killed those boys without giving them an opportunity to defend the allegation leveled against them represent some Nigerians who praise politicians who steal their resources with impunity. They set up fake profiles and groups on Facebook aimed at laundering the dirty images of the people who pauperize them. They kill for these politicians for crumbs, and call people who say things ought not to be so enemies of the state. They will be transported in buses to courtrooms to cheer up corrupt politicians facing trial in courts for looting millions of state funds for a thousand naira note each. They will be the first to praise their governors for providing non-existing infrastructure and amenities. They will rise in defense of a non performing governor and say a road has been built where there is none while their relatives die daily on those roads. They will write articles in praise of such mega-thieves and wear t-shirts with the
images of such people emblazoned on them. But, they will quickly form a kangaroo court and kill people who commit petty crimes. One other thing, I am sure that there were pickpockets, kidnappers, and thieves amongst the mob that callously wasted the lives of those boys.
The role of the police in the saga is also thought provoking. There is a report in the media credited to the inspector general of police which sought to exonerate the police; it said the police officers at the scene of the lynching ran away because the crowd threw stones at them. Were they not armed? Why did they not shoot in the air to scare the crowd away? The same police will be the first to shoot a bus driver over a twenty-naira note or intimidate innocent citizens with their guns and vans but they could not rescue those boys by firing some shots from their guns in the air. Who does not fear a man with a gun? Another media account attributed to some of the suspects and the sister of one of the victims said one of the policemen joined in beating the students and encouraged the mob to kill them. From that account, that means the police do not even believe in their statutory role in the society.
Nigerians do not take responsibility for their actions. Even when they are caught in the act, there will be excuses. Some of the 13 suspects that were paraded by the police denied raising their hands on those boys, those that agreed said it was only minimal. I am not saying that they are guilty; they are still innocent until proven otherwise. In addition, some people have written in defense of the Aluu people. We now hear that non-indigenes bought up Omuokiri village long ago and the indigenes have suddenly ceased to live there. We have been told that strangers committed the act. The indigenes were probably the spectators. I read in one of the media accounts that the boys were taken to some chiefs in Omuokiri-Aluu who gave the mob the permission to do away with the boys. If that is so, are those chiefs' also non-indigenes? Trust Nigerians to have a ready defence at any given time.
On a lighter note, Elechi Amadi, a literary icon of repute and author of several novels, poems, and plays hails from Aluu community but many people do not know that. One of his works is the widely read novel, “The Concubine” which was used as a WAEC exam text in Literature in English for 30 years. If you were a literature student in school or even a novel buff, I am sure you will remember the fictional characters Emenike, Madume, Ekwueme and the beauty queen, Ihuoma in that book. His works projected that community's' image positively but the dastardly act of a few has smeared that image now. It has given the community a negative perception that would forever live with them. It has made them a butt of jokes on the social media; and people now remember that Aluu means abomination in Igbo language.