On October 5 2012 ,apocalypse seemed to have dawned on omuokiri village in Aluu clan when a callous mob swooped on four students [Biringa Chidiaka Lordson,a 2nd year theatre arts student,Ugonna Kelechi Obuzor,also a 2nd year geology student, Mike Lloyd Toku,a year two civilengineering student and Tekena Erikena a student of basic studies] for an alleged crime many say they never committed.The four boys were stripped naked like the doll-babies of a mischevious child by the blood thirsty lynching mob,they were beaten up by the merciless crowd like a flibbertigibbet would do his dusty sofas,their heads were banged repeatedly with sticks of different shapes and sizes like Lagbaja beating his talking drum for an implacable audience.They were flogged with unrefined canes plucked from the dirty thickets of Aluu.The sophomores would have thought that the time was ripe to compose their dirge when those ominous tyres and fuels found their way into the scene.We all know in this part of the world that the sight of tyres and gallons of fuel in the possession of an angry mob connotes a death sentence.
The slain undergraduates,decently looking boys could tickle the fancy of most girls within their age bracket on a very good day,but not that angry mob,rather than tickling them they incured their wrath,a female voice in the mob rather than whispering sweet nothings in their ears shouted in a gory tone’’kill am,kill dat one well well,e be like say dat one neva die finish o’’.The young men were bathed generously with fuels they had thought were scarce.Fuels were poured all over their bodies-ears,noses and mouths,they had no option than to drink fuel like brandy.These mean mob slaughtered these boys like sheep for festivity.They were surrounded by an eager crowd waiting to see what would happen next like those ancient Romans beingentertained by watching the crucifiixion of martyrs in the arena and like spartacus giving his fellow gladiators the left leg of fellowship.Like Job of old they would have cursed that day the pigheads got hold of them despising the beseeching words of their preys .They saw the fury and callousness of bushmen they had only known and read about in textbooks and movies shaking their grotesque ungabbed posterior in their faces as they were burnt alive like sacrifices offered to Baal.
I cannot tell for sure what led to the butchery of those lads.Some say they went to place a demand for a debt owed them by an inhabitant of the Aluu community who shrewdly called them thieves like the proverbial thief caught in a farmyard,calling the farmer the thief before the latter raised an alarm.Whatever the case! Even if they actually stole and robbed the community blue,they should have been taken to the law enforcement agents where they could be granted fair hearing,they never deserved to be treated with such canibalistic brute force as if they were the least of all beasts.
It has not been given to any man or group the natural right to take the life of any man.God condemns it,even many nations of the world now condemn the death penalty. No man on earth is pure enough to administer the termination of life,little wonder, God says’’vengeance is mine’’.It is the exclusive preserve of the creator of life to decide who should live and who should die.Death,I have always thought is not even a good enough punishment for a bad man because it is designed for every man to die by different means.The killing of a bad man is therefore not a punishment since he becomes no different from the good man he has killed.Punishment by man becomes useless when the criminal is not alive to feel the impact.
I am still not certain on the men who fanned the embers of the macabre gyrations,but I know who they work for.They are the devils’ apprentices.The craft of killing and maiming men in such barbaric fashion clearly showed that the extra-judicial killers had been taking serious tutorials from the malevolent ancient one whose only objectives are to steal,kill and destroy.Perhaps,majority of the mob were unemployed/less busy youths who were idle and could only savour the gory opportunity of lynching to get themselves occupied.I doubt if a highly engaged youth determined to create something good out of his life would join the animalistic feast.No doubt,the devil’s apprentices had idle minds that satan himself used as his workshop in teaching them the arts of brutality,savagery and the rare cullinary skill of converting human flesh to sausagemeat and barbeque.The episode shows how many Nigerians are gradually turning into beasts in their minds because they no longer have respect for civil institutions.Impunity is the only reason men would burn a human being to death for minutes in the open without trepidation.Maybe not their fault,it could be that they have lost faith in the administrative process.Respect is rooted in faith and trust,you know.
It is a good thing to know that the incident was captured by a phone camera which will facilitate the taming of those devil’s apprentices but again it has portrayed Nigeria in the eyes of international community as a country in its hobbessian state where life is nasty,brutish and short;a country far from the very civilization that birthed the phone camera which captured the stone-age lynching.Again,I must admit that the lynching was not carried out by our so-called ‘leaders’ who we always blame for our woes but by some of the masses themselves in their street corner, this shows that the problem with the country is not only in leadership per se but in the conduct of the ordinary people in their private street corners because it is from street corners that people graduate into leadership positions.We therefore must ensure in our private lives that the tenets of God and not the commands of the devil are scrupulously obeyed.
I sympathise with the families,friends,colleagues of the slaughtered lads and also the entire University of port harcourt as they mourn four of their own.
On a final note I wish to borrow from the verbal bank of Lakunle, the over-zealous grandiloquent character of Wole Soyinka’s Lion and the Jewel in condemning this act of jungle justice in Aluu community as’’...a savage custom,b arbaric,o utdated,r ejected,denounced,ac cursed,e xcommunicated,ar chaic,d egrading,h umiliating,un speakable,redundant,ret rogressive,re markable,un palatable...is my bag empty?No,I own only the shorter companion dictionary,but I ve ordered the longer one-You wait!...an ignoble custom,infamous,ignominious {and} shaming the heritage of our custom’’!.
kip impactin...
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