The Beast in Us

By Rudolf Ogoo Okonkwo

She glanced at her watch. It was 2:13pm. Quickly she sprinkled the salt in her palm into a pot of egusi soup in front of her. She covered the pot, rested her shoulders on the kitchen wall as she stood up from a wooden chair near the stove. She walked to the front of the house, moving each leg with great effort. She was nine months pregnant. It took some time before she made it to the front yard.

 For a while she stood there, her hands supporting her waist. Her face gleamed in the tropical day light. She waited for the school bus to drop off her son. It was his second week at the school located in the town next door. She still missed him whenever he left and worried about how he was faring in school. 

As she waited, a light breeze carried the aroma of egusi soup to her nose. Or was it the scent that was trapped on her Buba, she wondered. She bent her head and smelled the tip of her blouse.

And the bus appeared from a distance. As its breaks screeched, she stepped aside, away from the road’s pavement. The bus door swung open and her three-year old son twirled down. He stepped on the red soil with a wobbly gait. 

His eyes had gone inside their sockets and his lips curled around his teeth. His cheeks were pushed deep into his mouth. The young woman felt something in her stomach. She dragged her feet toward her son, her hands stretched for a hug. 

The boy did not run to her the way he used to. His oversized school bag hung on his tiny shoulders. She got to him and picked him up. Up in the air, she asked him if he was okay and the little boy started to cry. She held tight to him and toddled back into the house, wiping his tears along the way. She kept asking what was wrong and the little boy kept pointing at various parts of his body.

Inside, she placed him down on the bed and stripped him bare. She did not know when a loud scream came out of her mouth. His tiny body had lacerations on his back, front, side, arms and legs. There was no way to lay him on the bed without him feeling piercing pain. She gathered soft towels and placed them underneath him. 

She called her husband on the phone to inform him. As the boy cried, she called his teacher’s phone. The teacher said that the boy refused to sleep at school so she flogged him to get him to sleep. Her heart jumped. Her blood bubbled. She ran from one end of the room to another searching for what to rub on his wounds to lessen the pain. She picked dusting powder, glanced at the instructions and put it down. She grabbed a can of Vaseline and dropped it. 

Then she decided to drape the wounds with towel soaked in warm water. She went to the kitchen to boil a kettle of water. There she noticed that her pot of soup had been burning all along. Smoke loitering all over the kitchen.

Her husband rushed back home. They debated what to do. There were not a lot of good options. If they report to police they would need money to get the police to act. Beyond that, their son would be dismissed from the only private school around them. 

The only option would be to have him go to the dilapidated public schools nearby. They did not want him to have the kind of poor foundation they had at village schools. They did not want to be labeled trouble makers, either. They decided to nurse their son back to health. They chose to hope that his teacher would not beat him again.

Their son is my godson.

All across Nigeria and Africa, there are so many young and helpless children who are daily abused. They are abused by parents, guardians, teachers, family members, distant relations and strangers alike.
The tears of these little children contaminate our land. Some of these abuses are so institutionalized that we don’t see them for what they are. Some have been carried on generations after generations. The victims become apostles of the same acts after they have survived and outgrown their abusers.

Corpses have more respect than children in Nigeria. What house girls go through in homes across Nigeria each day is enough for the prayers of Nigerians not to be answered for a decade. 

The sad thing about these ill-treatments is that majority of the perpetuators are the elite. The same elite who are educated and are supposed to show the light to the vast majority of our people – a majority who did not have the opportunity to understand the connection between human dignity, moral compass and compassionate society.

In the homes where many of us grew up, we observed our parents and other adults treat house girls like sub-humans. Some of us participated in such inhuman treatments. We beat, abuse, molest and deprive these children of the poor under the pretense that we are raising them. 

In many homes across Nigeria you could identify the house girl by the way she dressed, even when the family is out in public. When the parents speak to the kids, the tone they use reveals who is their child and who is the house girl.

The real measure of our humanity is not in how we treat those who are rich, those who are influential and those who are “useful” to us. The real measure of our humanity is how we treat those who are helpless, those who are weak and those who are disadvantaged. Often those we consider helpless, useless and beneath us are the most influential people in our lives.  They are 


“We essentially have animals pretending to be humans. There is no morality left in our religion. There is no ethics guiding our behaviors. There is no enforcement of our laws. We are ruled by our very basic human instincts and yet wonder why our society is backward and corrupt.”

the ones who cook for us, wash our clothes, drive us around and take care of our children. They deserve better treatment from us than members of the high society. It is insanity to show contempt to people who are an integral part of our innermost lives.

What makes Nigeria’s case so pathetic is that the three core sources for the reinforcement of human dignity in any society failed us at the same time – our ethical, religious and legal roots all washed away at once? 

We essentially have animals pretending to be humans. There is no morality left in our religion. There is no ethics guiding our behaviors. There is no enforcement of our laws. We are ruled by our very basic human instincts and yet wonder why our society is backward and corrupt.

The children we abuse today will tomorrow take their revenge on our children and our children’s children. By violating the dignity of others, we invite a violation of our dignity. Those we degrade often lose their sense of what is rational. And when that happens, we all become victims of their irrationalities. 

Our degradation of those who find themselves in low social status causes harm to them and also to us. When we deny our fellow human beings their dignity we open the door for greater evil to come into our homes and our society. 

Our cruelty to the less privileged does not just erode our conscience; it diminishes our sense of shame. And when that happens, a little of what makes us human dies with it. Those who take joy in depriving others of their happiness are asking for posterity’s curse as a payback.

Frequently we take this abusive behavior with us when we move abroad. In My Life Has A Price, Tina told a story of how, as a 13-year old girl she was taken from Nigeria to France to live with Former Nigeria’s footballer, Godwin Okpara.

 The former Paris Saint-Germain star, Godwin, and his wife, Linda, enslaved and abused Tina in France even while she raised their children for them. They spat on her, called her stupid, denied her education, beat her and sexually molested her. Godwin is now serving 10-year jail term while Linda is serving 15-year jail term. Their children are in foster care.

Tina’s kind of story plays out in millions of homes everyday in Nigeria. We partake in it. We perpetuate it. And we pretend that it is not evil. Yet, we are repulsed by the video of those men who grabbed four innocent students of the University of Port Harcourt, beat them up, and set their bodies on fire. 

But if the video of how we treat our house girls, our drivers, our gateman, our apprentices, our cook, our gardener, our students, our workers, our subordinates at work, and all those lower in status is captured and shown to the world, it may be as repulsive as that of the Aluu lynching mob.

Fifty-two years of progressive corruption, unrestrained impunity, accelerating injustice, disappearing cultural custodians and deepening self deceit have unhinged the furculum of our society’s moral core. It has brought out the beast in us – mini- lynching mobs strolling across our communities violating, humiliating and harming every unfortunate being on our path just to appease our uninhibited desires.

To begin to rebuild a moral future for our society, we need to rise above our animal instinct. Therapist Craig Nakken argues that we need to replace arrogance with humility, hate with love, resentment with forgiveness, greed with charity, disdain with empathy, skepticism with trust, apathy with care and inequality with equality. Our world would be a different place if we follow ethicist Bruce Weinstein five principles - do no harm, make things better, respect others, be fair and be loving.

Kindness, goodness, decency and love are infectious. And as the New York City train says, they start with you. And on and on they travel until they get to my three-year-old godson.

ALUU FOUR KILLINGS: ARE YOU IN SUPPORT OF JUNGLE JUSTICE?

Babalola Yusuf Abiola

In a society where majority of the people have lost faith and confidence in the government of the land, what the citizens usually experience are lawlessness, chaos, jungle justice and civil unrest. But the fact remains that in a situation like that, only the innocent and the underprivileged suffer the most.

The UNFORTUNATE FOUR that were murdered in cold blood by the indigenes of Aluu community in Rivers state were victims of circumstances of the inadequacies and corruption in the nation’s security and legal system, because should these systems work effectively and properly as they should and as we see and hear in some societies of the world, the boys would not have been killed in such condemnable manner they were killed.

They rather would have been handed over to the relevant security agencies for thorough investigation and prosecution if found guilty irrespective of personality of parents or social stratification because in other societies, the law is a respecter of nobody, not even their leaders or the billionaires.

But here in Nigeria, the reverse is the case as hardened criminals are left off the hook without persecution while innocent Nigerians who know little or nothing about an offence are put behind bars because they have no  godfather to speak for them.

In the case of the UNFORTUNATE FOUR they were lynched and burnt to death by people that are supposed to protect them, gone are those days when students are seen as the leaders of tomorrow and are taken care of by their host communities.

When I was still in the polytechnic, though the school I attended was one of the notorious institution in the South Western part of the country (apologies to graduates and students of Moshood Abiola Polytechnic, Abeokuta), that whenever the name of the institution is mentioned anywhere in the country we are seen and addressed as a cultist and prostitutes, still host communities pampers, cherish and protect us.

I still remember the old days when I stay many days without money or food stuffs in my half room apartment still the host communities provided what I eat, drink without even knowing who my parents are but in Aluu community the reverse was the case not because they are evil from the beginning but because something must have been the reasons why they behave like that. 

Am not holding brief for Aluu villagers neither am I supporting them for what they have done to the innocent students but I will like to ask few questions from my readers, has any one of you ever experienced a robbery scene before or have you ever seen a place where cultist are dealing with innocent students on campus before? If no then listen to this.

I was in the office discussing this Aluu incident with a very senior colleague in the office and he said “if these boys are really cultist I am totally in support of the punishment meted out to them” are you surprised then wait for this bombshell “a fellow corps member was killed in port Harcourt by suspected student cultists when I was on national service because they wanted to dispossess him of his mobile phone and laptop.

This guy was not struggling any of his belongings with them yet he was stabled on the neck and bled to death some days to his passing out,” my senior colleague narrated.

For anybody who has witness a robbery scene before, you see these guy brandishing dangerous weapons, beating, raping and most times killed their victims even after dispossessing them of their belongings, am sure we have not forgotten the case of the over 40 secondary school students that were rapped early this year by yet to be identified armed robbers when the students were returning from their school in the East.

Am not justifying what Aluu villagers did, but if the boys are truly what they were called that serve them right!

This is my deduction about what happened to the students and it is still a hypothesis because nobody knows what really happened, Nigerians and the world were only being filled with conflicting reports about the incident.

“Also, until Nigerians are told the real account of the story, what led to the lynching, molestation and burning, I pitch my tent with residents of Aluu Community”

Before a vigilante group could be formed in a community, it means the state, and I mean the (police) cannot guarantee security of lives and property in the said community any longer hence it is imperative for the community leaders to safe guard the lives and properties of her subjects from attacks.

Probably, men of the underworld have been given the residents’ sleepless night, so they found a way out by forming a vigilante group to secure their property. Also, due to youthful exuberance, which youths specially students don’t know where to direct them, thus direct it on the community members so Aluu being a student residential area might have been under siege by the student cult members.

When I was in the polytechnic I was opportune to see a video on a friend laptop where a group of cult members invaded a student home and ask a guy and his girlfriend to have sexual intercourse in their presence, they even go to the extent of filming the act and send the clips to friends and students on the campus, the lady’s offence was that he left one of their members to date another student in the institution, the lady later left the school when the shame was too much for her to bear.

What about the molestation of three innocent students of Tai Solarin University of Education, Ogun State by cult members because a friend of their victims was alleged to have slapped one of the cult members, the ladies were kidnapped and taken to an uncompleted building where the ladies were undressed, molested and the video taken were sent to the internet and all around the university environments.

One of the three ladies could not withstand the humiliation she received from the cultist for an offence she knows nothing about hence commit suicide, the rest as they say is now a story because nothing was done to the guys after the issue was reported to the police, though arrest were made in the first instance but nothing concrete came out of the arrest.

So, in a society where impunity are not checked, jungle justice are meant to happen because people no more have patience and believe in the system, then I ask you these mind bugging questions, if the robbers that raped the innocent secondary students on their way to Lagos were caught in the act by residents of the community where the act was perpetuated, will they have forgiven them or will the community have administer jungle justice on the criminals? Or will the parents of the students ever wish the criminals well with the trauma the children will have to live with till the end of their life. 

What about a big brother in my community that have his father killed in his presence by men of the underworld who visited their house, will he ever wish the boys who perpetuated the act well and should those guys be caught that night then will he wished to hand them over to the police or administer jungle justice on them? Permit me to borrow a verse from the Old Testament that says, an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.

And lastly, the corps member that was killed in port Harcourt some days to his passing out parade when he was being disposed of his personal belongings he bought with his hard earned money, if you are his family members and you caught the perpetrators in the act will you hand them over to the police or administer jungle justice?

These and many more are questions begging for answers from Nigerians am not in support of what Aluu community did to the promising young chaps, neither am I in support of jungle justice or kangaroo trial but if the government doesn’t restore confidence into the mind of the people in the society, should corruption is not fought to stand still in the security system or the society at large, Nigeria will soon experience another Aluu killings.

Also, until Nigerians are told the real account of the story, what led to the lynching, molestation and burning, I pitch my tent with residents of Aluu community,

 

Aluu 4: I watched them kill my brother – Tekena’s sister

From TONY JOHN, Port-Harcourt

A sister of one of the four University of Port Harcourt (UNIPORT) students brutally murdered last Friday in Umuokiri village, Aluu, Rivers State, has narrated how her younger brother and his friends were lynched.
Miss Ibisobia Elkanah, elder sister of Tekena Friday Elkanah, revealed yesterday that policemen visited the scene where the students were burnt to death after they were severely injured and that one of the law enforcement agents told the perpetrators of the dastardly act “to burn them alive”

The murdered students, Chiadika Lordson, Ugonna Kelechi Obusor, Mike Lloyd Toku, and Tekena Elkanah, all part two students, were murdered in cold blood over alleged theft of a laptop computer and a blackberry phone. Ibisobia, a part-time final year student of Marketing, at the same university who witnessed the incident, said on that fateful day, at about 7.30 am, she was at the house of her girl friend in the community when she heard people shouting outside. “I dashed out and beckoned on my friend to come since she lived in the area.

The thing attracted much noise and attention. I went there but did not actually see or recognize any of them, due to the crowd. “I heard when people were saying the people they (vigilance group) caught were strangers; that they want to burn them.

They said they were asking them questions, so that they could know their senders.” She said after that, she went back to her friend’s house, but could not stay there. “I went back again. I went through the bush path so that I could see them properly. I started jumping to see if I could see them. I jumped again but saw nothing. I jumped the second time and I saw Tekena. Tekena happened to be my brother. “I told myself that I was not seeing well, this thing is a lie. I jumped the third time, I saw Lloyd (one of the victims). So, I started shouting.

From what I gathered, the first time I came, they said they were not known; that they were strangers. As I identified them, I started shouting. Ibisobia said she continued shouting that Tekena was her brother, saying that he came to her on Thursday in school and she gave him his school fees. “I told them that somebody should allow me to ask him what happened and what he came to do. He would confide in me. He was wailing and in a pool of blood.”

“Tekena has been my younger brother for many years. I saw them as they lay in the water naked with leaves covering their nakedness.” His elder sister said she struggled and entered the crowd. Somebody shouted “Who is that? What is she doing inside?” “People were pushing me and I started crying. He is my brother! He is not a thief! Somebody behind me said O’girl run for your life.

About two persons turned and asked, are you sure he is your brother, and said may be I was the person that sent him to go and steal.” Ibisobia replied them that how could she send him, that she did not look as such. ‘They said I should run for my life that I would be the next one, fifth person.” The young lady lamented that before she could get to her friend’s room to call her family members, she learnt that the mob had taken them to the burrow pit. “So, I went there again.

I called my family and they started coming. The police van came, went into the mob and they were talking to them (youths). The people kept quiet as police were making statements. “I heard them laughing. You know, they were happy. They kept quiet again. Police talked and they laughed again. The next was for me to see three policemen coming out of the mob, boarded their van. And, one of the said “burn them alive”. “I must confess, I was gripped with fear.

I had the intention to talk to the man that said they should be burnt alive. As soon as they (police) drove off, I saw the flames. I was thinking they burnt them after they had killed them. Later, I discovered that they were burnt while they were alive.