The murder of a promising and innocent soul, quranically speaking, is like the destruction of a whole nation (Quran 5: 32). But there are some among my compatriots who wish Nigeria ‘dead’. Whenever they go to bed at night, they hope to wake up at dawn, not here in Nigeria anymore but in, for example, Australia or America. For their infirmities, they blame Nigeria; for their failures, they excoriate and abominate this nation.
The other day I engaged one of them; I asked him – a compatriot of yours and mine – ‘show me the Nigeria you detest with passion; where is it? Is it not you? Nigeria is an abstract entity in the absence of its citizens; we are all the Nigeria that we love to hate; while some of us are striving to lift it high, others are busy working to keep it down”!
But there are other Nigerians who do not wish Nigeria dead but are happy to ‘kidnap’ its future. “But who are they?”, you may wonder. They are corrupt governors and legislators; they are civil servants who have become ‘devils’ servants. They are the key players in the corporate world whose sole desire is to appropriate this nation’s wealth unto themselves and their cronies. These are not foreigners. These are Nigerians like me and you. These are citizens who are loyal to Beelzebub, not to the Nigerian constitution. They refer to our country in the third ‘person’, not in the first or second. They relate to this country as the Jackal relates to the carcass in the jungle. Hatred, animus, abhorrence- all these are lexicons in their discourses. They wish Nigeria ‘dead’. They are frustrated and sad that Nigeria is still here; that we are still here and there.
Hardly do those who commit these atrocities, these acts of corruption and unconscionable violence, of the destruction of innocent lives – be it in Kaduna or Kubwa – know that for every soul they destroy, for every act of corruption that they perpetrate, thousands of innocent lives are sent to the great beyond. Thus, when the agents of darkness and the patron saints in the underground decided to ‘sacrifice’ Nabeeha, to destroy that which they cannot and indeed could not have created, it did not occur to them that they were handing the ticket to paradise to her on a platter of gold.
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The so-called kidnappers would not have known that in bringing Nabeeha to the sword, in orchestrating her quick return to her Creator, they were making a case for her inclusion as a martyr, as a co-heir of paradise together with the wife of Pharaoh who, while being visited with the most agonizing punishment on earth by her husband, opened her heart to her Creator saying: “O! My Lord, build for me a house in your presence in paradise and rescue me from Fir’awn and his evil and rescue me from the handiwork of an iniquitous nation” (Quran 66: 11).
Then Nabeeha breathed her last. The beat stopped in her. Like it did for Maryam and Maria in Plateau where death is now more certain than life. Nabeeha breathed her last at a time when other compatriots of ours were breathing their last in Kaduna, in Kano, in Lagos, in all parts of our country. Thus, the moment Nabeeha breathed her last was exactly when she stopped being the faceless Nabeeha known only to those close to her; she ceased being one other sister among the sisters. At death, Nabeeha became a martyr. She became a signifier. A metaphor. A symbol. A symbol of a nation where life and living are now synonymous with that in the jungle – it is either you eat or you are eaten.
Nabeeha breathed her last and became a metaphor; a metaphor for a country at war with itself. Nabeeha ‘’tasted death at the prime of her youth’’ in order to become a signifier – the signified being this seemingly atavistic abhorrence, on our part and yours, for peace; that inglorious notion that the iron is stronger than the air, that that which is countable is of greater value than the subtle, solemn and most profound elements in nature. Or how else might we make sense of the seeming inanity in the assumption that insofar as it results into millions of naira, it does not matter how many souls are destroyed in the process.
In other words, since successful governments in this country appear either incapable or unprepared to provide lasting solutions to this socio-cultural and moral hara-kiri euphemistically referred to as kidnapping, we, as citizens may have to devise ingenuous ways to combat the scourge by ourselves.
What about appropriate ‘pricing’ of human souls? Yes. Exactly how much should the human ear cost? Exactly how much should the human head cost? Indeed, an answer to the latter would be useful for those body-part traffickers and sellers – the scavengers, the sociopaths and psychopaths who desecrate our cemeteries daily. Or is it not an indulgence in sheer tomfoolery to sell a whole human head for ten thousand naira only?!
Indeed, long before the event of the kidnap of Nabeeha and her sisters, a greater act of kidnapping had actually taken place in our public service. A public officer was caught after he had “kidnapped” more than one hundred billion of our commonwealths.
The incident had no precedent in the tortuous history of sleaze and scum in this nation. Towards the end of last year, however, and in recognition of his “gallantry”, he was turbaned in his village and given a chieftaincy title!!!
