The Consul General of the Nigerian Consolate in South Africa says we’re set to protest the killing of Nigerians in the former Apatheid enclave that had her greatest support from Nigeria during the days of Apatheid.
In the past 30 months, over 100 Nigerians have been murdered in South Africa. Yet all we hear is that we are SET TO PROTEST!!!
What type of country is this? How does anyone expect me not to be ashamed to be called a Nigerian Citizen? Is it not the case that the South Africans, seeing that Nigeria has become one gigantic human abattoir, are just extending the killing spree?
Do you know that the government of Zimbabwe had to set up a high-powered committee (that included our own Emeka Anyaoku) to investigate why 6 people (I didn’t say 60), I mean 1,2,3,4,5,6 people, died during their election?
Do you know that the way people die in Nigeria daily is more than the way people die in Syria, Somalia, and Afghanistan (put together) in a month?
Do our leaders understand that innocent blood cries?
Can the government in Jerusalem keep mute, and just be getting SET TO PROTEST, when a Jew dies in an unexplained circumstance in a foreign land? Just one Jew?
Why have cows become more valuable than human lives in Nigeria?
In 1980, Nigeria secured Zimbabwe’s Independence, but why are human beings valued more there? In the epic play, THE GODS ARE NOT TO BLAME, playwrit, Ola Rotimi had asked, ‘how long must feverish birds tremble in silence before their keepers?’
And biblical Holy Writ also asks ‘who will rise up for me against the evil doers…against the workers of iniquity’? (Ps.94;16).
Any leader in Nigeria (political, religious, traditional,intellectual or economic) that goes to bed and sleeps soundly, in the midst of these display of holocaustic, genocidal, murderous orgies, is not only just INHUMAN, but actually NOT HUMAN!!
How much longer would this (to use Achebe’s inagery) ‘artificial lattice’, last before she falls off the precipiece and fumble, tumble and crumble into the macadamized thoroughfare of history?
Unfortunately for us all, we shall be affected one way or the other – the government, the people, the state and the society!
Evang. Joseph Agbo, Ph.D
