One killing, Too Many
By Hashim Muhammad Sulieman, PhD
If these extra judicial killings were done across the Niger, by now things wouldn’t have been this cool on the international arena.
By now, global television screens would have been beaming with the number of deaths and international pressure would have been on the government.
However, since we don’t value our lives in this part of the contraption, some of us are even blaming the murdered victims.
The young chap murdered today was killed in their house when the trigger happy but hungry uniformed man fired two shots through the closed front door of the house.
In the last few minutes, I had to silently unfriend some quasi homo sapiens on Facebook for writing to latently show how happy they are for these deaths.
One particular individual suffering from error of civilisation kept hammering about how innately happy he was over the deaths.
It is not his choice that makes me angry but the fact that the guy is a local government leader of a morality police who currently enjoys local government bylaws that accord him the capacity to apprehend Nigerians.
Just imagine Nigeria runs state police and such characters are made champions of local government office of the state police. What such people would do in similar situations can only be imagined.
As for now, I am using this opportunity to call on our people and the families of those murdered victims not to allow these murders to be swept under and be forgotten without justice being served.
The legal provisions that guarantee democracy are same provisions that guarantee protests. Should protesters violate any law, they should be apprehended and be taken to our constitutional courts for trials and sanctioning.
Till now, I’ve not seen nor hear any part of our legal provisions that give anyone the power to summarily execute Nigerians and send them to the world beyond.
We are humans, we are guided by the laws of our land. If any Nigerian breaks the law, let the constitutionally recognised proceedings take charge.
As for those being happy for the murders, simply because the protesters refuse to listen to some emotional caregivers, I boldly say this, jungle killings are no respecters of any emotional attachments, they go round, if they don’t meet you now, they may meet one of yours next time.
Indeed, the least we can do to those irrationally killed is to call for justice to be served on their behalf.
Dr. Hashim writes from Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria.