Bola Ige; Deborah Samuel; Fwimbe Gofwan and many others. Every Nigerian must know someone killed in the country, prematurely forced to go to the great beyond, and in whose honour Nigeria has failed to do anything.
In December 2001, as the midday sun burned, baking the ancient town of Ibadan, Nigeria’s attorney general and minister of justice, Bola Ige, was killed by assailants. In May 2022, within the precincts of the Shehu Shagari College of Education, Sokoto, the Sokoto State capital, Deborah Samuel was lynched by a feral mob of murderous religious fanatics with the religious clerics who retroactively supported the killings from Bauchi and Abuja just as complicit in the lynching. In September 2023, while running around to make ends meet in the impossible game of musical chairs that Nigeria has become, a destitute mob of ferocious criminals stoned Fwimbe Gofwan to death in Jos, Plateau State, shattering the serenity of the town and reminding citizens of the miles of pain brought on by the Jos crisis at the turn of the new millennium.
In each of these cases, Nigeria has without fail failed to account for the killers of her children, with their blood allowed to run free and dry up, caking the pages of history in blood. Their blood continues to cry out from the ground against the country even until this day.
As is usual when crimes like these occur, the police promised in each instance to investigate, arrest, prosecute and incarcerate the perpetrators. Yet, in each of those cases, the police has only succeeded in adding to its growing catalogue of stark failures grimly reflected in the unsolved murders and the gleeful freedom of the murderers who continue to walk free even now.
In Deborah Samuel’s case, a WhatsApp audio innocuously sent to a class WhatsApp group had awakened primal instincts in animals who were pretending to be students all along. Her murderers not only set her ablaze on what was supposed to be the hallowed grounds of a school but made a video triumphantly celebrating their deed.
That was not all. They found support in the shameless endorsement of some Islamic clerics in Abuja and Bauchi and in the complicit non-appearance of prosecution lawyers in the case against the suspects, and the shameful representation of the accused by a legal team of 34 lawyers led by a professor.
Despite this travesty on many levels, Nigeria has refused to rebuke anyone for her murder. Was it because she was a Christian, killed by a Muslim mob? Is every religion not supposed to forbid the gruesome killing of defenceless individuals? What is the worth of a religion which refuses to forbid such?
More than a year after his death, Fwimbe Gofwan’s friends and family have been left to handle their pain anyhow they can. A charity has been set up by family and friends to honour his memory. Yet, the country that called him citizen has left his soul without the city that only justice can curate.
In her powerful indictment of the Mexican State, grieving; Dispatches from a wounded Country, Pulitzer-prize winning Mexican Journalist, Cristina Rivera Garza, writes:” Throughout this book, I call this State which has rescinded its responsibility for the care of its constituents’ body, the Visceraless State.”
Garza may have been writing about her native Mexico and the danger it has become to women, but the uncanny universality of language also meant she was describing Nigeria.
In 2001, a serving attorney general and minister of Justice was murdered. More than two decades later, Nigeria is yet to convict his killers. Two years have gone by in Deborah Samuel’s case. Fwimbe Gofwan grows ever colder in his grave more than a year after with each day that passes, decreasing the likelihood that his killers will be convicted.
A country without justice is one without just men. The implications of this are startlingly clear. Such a country is one that has lost its soul. Such a country is also one that has lost sleep because in a country where ghosts refuse to sleep because they must haunt their killers day and night, no one sleeps. No one.
Kene Obiezu,
