Nigeria, The Heartbreaker – Ayisha Osori

I can’t lie…Nigeria is a heartbreaker for those who truly love him.

It matters not how hard you try to accommodate his weaknesses and utter disregard for responsibility, the bottom line is that he does not care. Submissiveness and appeal to God does not help either, because the more you bend over backwards to fill in the massive craters left by nonchalance and years of financial recklessness and impropriety, the more the rot becomes your fault and eventually the burden of responsibility

Worried families

shifts to you. Suddenly, a government that is incapable of doing anything for its citizens starts singing ‘government cannot do it alone’.

You know all this, but still you live in hope and faith in hard work; miracles still happen. You hear the unbelievable stories of the wealth Nigeria is spending and giving away to his favorites and you can’t find it in your heart to believe the stories. It explains your inaction. Like the child of a monstrous abuser, you have convinced yourself, that he cannot be so cruel, so what he is doing cannot be so wrong.

Until. You hear that parents had to collect the hacked, broken, bullet riddled and burnt corpses of their sons from school in Buni Yadi. A school that was supposed to be protected by soldiers who mysteriously disappeared hours before the attack.  

Until. You hear that parents of young female students abducted from their school by heavily armed men in the middle of the night, had to put together their own rescue operation. 

That shocked and distraught parents had to scrap together less than N14,000 to fund volunteers to track their daughters down. And that every step of the way to the forest where terrorists allegedly live in plain view, they were alone, with not even the after scent of a worn military boot to give them comfort. Think about it.

 Think about it in the context of you and anyone you love. Think about it again in context of Nigeria’s security budget of N1 Trillion in 2013 and N845 Billion in 2014. We have hit the bottom of the barrel of depravity.

Yes, there is corruption everywhere. We are not naïve. We know that the financial payoff from defense contracts was a consideration when the United States went to war in Afghanistan and Iraq. We know that we do not have the monopoly of paying top dollar for substandard military equipment but this level of irresponsibility to the most vulnerable of citizens is a new low.

The death toll of Boko Haram over the last 5 years passed the 12,000 mark last year. In 2014 alone, we have already had close to 2000 deaths and it isn’t even June. Two days after the girls from Chibok were abducted in 4 trucks in convoy in a place under a state of emergency, South Korea, was hit by tragedy. 

On April 16, the Sewol ferry sunk, killing hundreds, mostly students. 115 passengers are still missing and since then heads have rolled literarily and figuratively. Kang Min-gyu the vice-principal of a high school hung himself when only 28 had been confirmed dead and eleven days after, the Prime Minister, Chung Hong-won resigned. He said the cries of parents kept him up all night.

So what do you do when your country does not love you back? Where your life means nothing to those charged with the responsibility for caring for you?  You try to take your country back. It is your only option. You look closely and dispassionately at the faces of those responsible for years of pain and abuse and you strip yourself of ethnic and religious blinkers and biases and ensure that every single one of them who got in by the ballot, leaves by the ballot. You stand firm that those appointed into particular offices must resign. Forget zoning. You come together, bonded by abuse, to make one last ditch effort to save yourself and your country, because you are already dying. We are all playing Russian roulette in Nigeria, clicking away at our temples as we carry on as best we can with our daily lives.

So, when you hear the call, the cry of mothers and fathers, of sisters and brothers, please drop everything and heed that call and come out in droves to make it clear that this abuse must end.