Buhari and the Killing of Our Corpers
I stood there at a street corner, unaware I was unable to move. It had to do with Obinna Okpokiri's face as it came to me then. Oh Obinna, how we could let you go at such tender age? Oh, so gruesomely, Obinna. OBI NNA Ya, his father's heart. Obi. Mohammadu Buhari decreed it and it also happened to Chinelo and her brother, and Ukeoma Ikechukwu and about 177 other Nigerian Youth Service Corps (NYSC) members, known as 'corpers.' Buhari, whose father had hardly settled in Daura from Niger Republic, when the former joined the Nigerian military, not having sufficient education for any other vocation. Buhari, the new head of Yandaba and Yantauri, had told his thugs, and he leads so many, that they should lynch anybody suspected of rigging the coming elections. Youth corpers were therefore penciled down as facilitators of Goodluck Jonathan's eventual victory. But read the message the corper Ukeoma Ikechukwu has left us with on his Facebook page, and you will know the hostile atmosphere in which pro-Jonathan voters in the North had cast their votes, and the method of operation of Buhari's party members. Ukeoma uttered,
“Na wao! This CPC supporters would hv killed me yesterday, no see threat oooo. Even after forcing underaged voters on me they wanted me to give them the remaining ballot paper to thumb print. Thank God for the police and am happy i could stand for God and my nation. To all corps members who stood despite these threats esp. In the north bravo! Nigeria! Our change has come.”
This is found on:
http://www.nigeriavillagesquare.com/articles/guest-articles/petition-for-the-withdrawal-of-youth-corps-members-from-trouble-prone-northern-states.html
Underage voters and people smuggled in from neighboring countries would account for about 35% of votes Buhari garnered. Ukeoma would drop dead, anyway. Do ask Buhari why those young people should be pushed into deep freezers now or lowered down in graves. In the turbulent days of his reign in Nigeria, Buhari had decided that Lawal Ojuolape, Bernard Ogedengbe, and Bartholomew Owoh should die in some questionable circumstances. Think of the distance between a 70-year old Buhari and his grave as against those of the corpers, some 20, some 21, the latter for whom the journey to the grave had to be quickened to please the 'strong man.'
We wept, didn't we? We wept about two years ago when, in Jos, Hausa/Fulani rioters first wrote the first newspaper headlines with the blood of youth corpers. Corpers hadn't been represented in such large numbers in previous Hausa/Fulani madness. Today, the NYSC can put up as many numbers as any group in riots in the North. Was it not three weeks ago that we were treated to this brutality as the NYSC recorded 25 casualties through a bomb blast in Suleija? As usual, the press barely had space to report the incident. Parents let it pass. Friends also. I got in and out of my usual places, not shedding a tear. Security for surviving corpers never mattered. Then, one is forced to ask, how could the corpers have taken up seats again at their stations as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened? How couldn't parents have reviewed the dire situations in which their children had found themselves? There are now screams of “We want to go home,” 'by 600 evacuated NYSC members,' a situation one finds encouraging. See Vangaurd of APRIL 23, 2011.
I have since identified this program as a criminal conception adopted in deceit to play games with the lives and fortunes of others. It is in lock step with other designs like the Joint Admissions Matriculations Board (JAMB), quota system and all other better-not-remembered devices in which Nigeria excels more than any country in the world. This instrument of denigration that is in the hands of certain people in Nigeria interferes with my life no matter how far away I want to keep it from me. Thus, it hurts when I find a younger one caught in it once again, as can be observed in conversations like this one:
From Europe, I would ask on the phone, “Younger sister (in the African sense), where did you say again you have been posted?”
“I just came back from the place. It is Katsina State,” she would reply.
“What? Katsina State?”
“Yes, now. … Four of us have been sent to a school in a place called Jibia. I am just trying to get used to the place.”
“Wait a minute. Isn't it Jibia, a town bordering Niger Republic?”
“Oh, you know. How did you? They say they will eventually take us to go see Maradi in Niger Republic.”
I would sit back in shock. I would be in shock because I know the youth service is dehumanizing, especially to girls. What parent would want to put a child in a place where the evil ones would find him or her for sport? I mean, send your child to Heaven knows where. I meet ex-corpers, who would want to support whatever claims by showing me personal programs they had implemented in Odessa or Siberia, on hot sand dunes in the far ends of the earth. In some cases, part of work they did was teaching young children how to mend their clothes and keep clean. I would observe that they did wonderful things to touch the lives of their fellow human beings. The ex-corpers would expect me to look up from those pictures and open up with words of praise. I wouldn't fail to tell them candidly they did right to help humanity, but also would try to let them know they couldn't have taken the right decisions to serve or to go to those places. Why wouldn't I have issues with the youth service, when these young people are sent to labor camps in the North to live on wages even almajiris would turn down? Many succumb to illnesses in these places that lack basic medical facilities. Life is knocked out of others on roads that are not meant to be run on by vehicles. Two years ago, a female youth corper was used by some hooligans in Maiduguri to show their aversion for the tradition of letting women put on the youth service trousers, by gang-raping the lady to death. Those people are still on the loose.
I once encountered three corpers from the South at a place called Benishek, in Yobe State. Looking from one a girl and to her two male colleagues, I realized that none of them had taken time to question why they always had to throw and sink a roped container into a well to get muddied water for their daily uses, and why they always had to turn up the lantern's wig to get more lighting when it was dark. There were mosquitoes and the heat to worry about. You could see Adamu Ciroma walk past because Potiskum where he comes from is nearby. Benishek has the honor of being a place the Boko Haram founder also planted his seeds.
Those three corpers came under the roof of a family of someone I had met in Lagos. The hosts were Christians and held strongly to their Christian belief, which was just convenient for the corpers. All the corpers were engaged in a secondary school in the neighborhood. I learned that every year some of them would find a home in that compound. Imagine that you sit back in your village in Imo State, and every year the Nigerian government will send some beautiful but poorly-funded Hausa or Fulani female corpers into your arms. Probably due to orientation, certain things appear differently to everybody. I want to now believe that some parents wouldn't mind waiting year long only to receive terrible news about their loved ones. Dear parent, why can't you ask the authorities concerned to strike out the names of your loved ones from the NYSC list?
Some friends and I have always wondered why some people have chosen this path to keep the supply of cheap labor and the like going for decades, and why it must always be our girls. The program is said to serve the purpose of national unity, whereby there is yearly cross-country traffic of fresh university graduates. There is exchange whereby Igbo and Hausa/Fulani corpers, for instance, go in opposite directions, away from their home states. But I have come off with the fact that in the past 39 years of the existence of the program, no less than 7 million or more Southern girls have roamed remote villages around Nguru, Kaura Namoda or Gamboru Ngala, border towns in the north of Nigeria. In the same period, the Hausa/Fulani-run NYSC has never let a single, I repeat, a SINGLE Fulani or Hausa girl into ANY town in the environmentally friendly Igbo land or Yoruba land or Ijaw land. The Fulani or Hausa girl may just send her name to her place of primary assignment - an oil corporation in Lagos or Port Harcourt - and not even bother to know how her office looks like, but will earn more than a comfortable fellow at the New York Stock Exchange.
We would have saved a lot of lives had our all-knowing people added to their knowledge words of wisdom like the ones provided free as far back as 2007 on this website: http://www.biafraland.com/NewsAnalysis2007/newsanalysis112307.htm
Fortunately, many people have now begun to speak up against the service as could be seen on the piece entitled 'They Are Saying NYSC Is A Death Trap That Must Be Scrapped!' You can click on this link to read the article:
Only three weeks ago, prior to the latest killings, one Oguchi Nkwocha criticized the program in a write up with the title 'Nigerian National Youth Service Corps (NYSC): who is being served?' You can click here to read Oguchi's comments:
http://www.modernghana.com/news/322603/1/nigerian-national-youth-service-corps-nysc-who-is-.html
Do ponder over this. Imagine that in the course of some business in Hadejia, Mallamadori or Jahun in Jigawa State, you see in an NYSC outfit, a lonely girl, who is Igbo or Yoruba, increase her pace along a lonely road as she is headed to work. How does it play out in your mind? Now, reset the scene and let it be Chinelo, who was murdered in cold blood. Chinelo's brother is introduced into the setting. On a visit, he brings brotherly love and moral support from home in Abia State, over a thousand kilometers away. Their devotion to church is beyond question seen in their mood as they get closer to church on this Sunday after the elections. Chinelo won't admit to her brother how awful she is feeling. She is however compelled by the feeling of being 'government property,' thereby immune to molestation, to hold up her head.
But, all of a sudden, they are forced to fall back upon sighting some excited Buhari adherents displaying machetes and Buhari posters. An encirclement is however complete with another group closing in from behind, with animalistic yells and celebratory dance done by turning this way and that way and back. Then, Chinelo realizes three of the thugs are young men she had tried to shake off weeks before. One is a university graduate she knows by name. Like a contest, hands go for her breasts and buttocks. Her vexed brother charges aimlessly at the mischief makers and the first machete cut takes off his right arm. A laugh celebrates that. Chinelo throws herself before the brother, but is seized, raped before her brother, with the entire town watching and, then, she is cut to pieces and the brother is left there to die slowly. The same mob, chanting “Sai Buhari,” storms into Chinelo's church, and when it leaves, an escapee watches their church go up in flames with the cries of about 80 church members heard in the inferno. The mob carefully chooses a new target, the NYSC lodge in town. There, seven youth corpers it encounters do not have the chance of escape. A mob in Bauchi has gotten a prize in Obinna Okpokiri, a policeman, Ukeoma Ikechukwu and another unnamed corper. The NYSC can several days later only account for 26 of the 51 sent to Jama'are, Giade, Misau, Azare and Dambam in Bauchi State. This is an addition to 32 other non-NYSC citizens killed in those places. A woman lost her son but recoils from the possibility of her name going in print.
Elsewhere, 50 other corpers barely escape being roasted alive because one of them thrusts himself against a door and forces the door open. The identity of this hero is a guided secret. Do I know why? In Kano, Katsina, Sokoto, Funtua, Bauchi, Potiskum, Hadejia, Kaduna, Zaria, people are caught up in burning houses, on the streets or places of work, with the number of Christians killed topping 1800; among them, we are told, about 180 youth corpers. Buhari is forced to call for calm only days after relative peace had returned.
The nation isn't shocked because this is the north of Nigeria, where in 1966, about 50,000 Igbos were killed in pogroms that were followed by 3 million Igbos killed between 1967 and 1970. In Jos alone, about 10,000 people must have been killed in the past few years. And all by the same people.
This time, we have discovered that the man in charge is someone called Mohammadu Buhari. He is seeking for something to boost his bruised ego, and knowing he has killers to fall back on, goes for it and gets it on a platter of gold. He wants the world to know an Ivory Coast is evolving in Nigeria. His mandate has been stolen, he says. He swept all the states in Nigeria, beating Goodluck Jonathan by 10 million votes, but can't understand why election victory certificate is handed to the man who came a distant second. If the killing of Obinna would transform Buhari into the offended party, why not go for it? Yet, Buhari's own children and the children of his friend Tunde Bakare, enjoy all the freedom this world offers.
Now, I am calling on the parents and relations of the dead NYSC members to act quickly and open a human rights case against Buhari. Some advocacy groups should assist to point out the way to the relevant offices of the International Court of Justice (ICJ). We know Britain may want to frustrate any such efforts, but only if they would be allowed to. It is clear that Buhari's fury was being acted out by his party followers. Take a look at this poll taken at Elomba.com.
The question asked is, “Who Do You Blame for the Post-election Violence in Northern Nigeria?”
General Buhari
321 74.7%
President Jonathan
43 10%
No one
36 8.4%
INEC
30 7%
Number of Voters : 430
First Vote : Tuesday, 19 April 2011 13:07
Last Vote : Friday, 23 April 2011 18:52
Below is the link:
http://www.elombah.com/index.php?option=com_poll&id=28:who-do-you-blame-for-the-post-election-violence-in-northern-nigeria
In all of this, even though he has made poor judgments recently as regards Africa, credit should be given to US President Barack Obama for allowing free and fair elections in Nigeria. If we had had George Bush or Tony Blair in power in the US and Britain respectively, Ibrahim Babangida or Abubakar Atiku or Buhari would have emerged President-elect of Nigeria; that is, according to Britain's colonial calculations.