Much Ado About Uromi-By Bolanle BOLAWOLE
turnpot@gmail.com 0705 263 1058
“When beggars die, there are no comets seen; heaven themselves blaze forth the death of princes” – spoken by Calpurnia, Julius Caesar’s wife, in William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar.
At first, I took little interest in the Uromi massacre for obvious reasons. How many of such assaults on our sensibilities do we suffer on a daily basis? So, any time I come across them – incessantly – on social media, especially when the authors are kind enough to warn viewers to beware, I delete and move away! To maintain one’s good health in today’s Nigeria, one must learn to go to Afghanistan, as writers call it. Afghanistanism means avoiding unfortunate issues or one that could land someone in trouble while preoccupying oneself with innocuous issues, especially from far away lands, to maintain one’s sanity and keep out of trouble.
Another reason why I initially avoided Uromi was because I knew that after the uproar and outrage that greeted it, it would soon pass into oblivion like many others before it in our recent past. Ours, like I have repeatedly said, is a country of one scandal, one moment. Before Uromi, we had the Natasha versus Akpabio “he wants to f*ck me” scandal, which is still trending. As if that and the lady’s kangaroo suspension were not bad enough, another leg of the macabre dance was the plot to recall her from office. Recall that it was in that same Kogi state that the attempt, in 2018, to recall another senator, Dino Melaye “caput” on its head “yakata”, as they say.
The shenanigans of a vindictive recall process apart, the embarrassment of watching Kogi state officials fall one on top of the other devising all manner of machinations to keep Natasha away from her place of birth, despite her undisputable rights, under law, to freedom of movement, beggars belief! If sensible and reasonable persons still remain in the land of Yahaha Bello, this is the time for them to show up to be counted.
In the midst of the Natasha/Akpabio melodrama, a state of emergency was declared in Rivers state. An elected governor was removed – even though his election was fraught with mind-boggling irregularities – and a retired military officer was asked to take his place. The irony of the situation was lost on a president who was a pro-democracy activist and one of the arrowheads of the “military-must-go” struggle that cost ordinary as well as prominent Nigerians lives and limbs as well as properties and liberties.
In the last one week alone we have had Uromi, the sack of the Board and Management of the NNPC, the president himself jetting out to France for what they call a two-week working visit, a euphemism for what I am sure you know! By now Nigerians must have become adept at reading the lips of their presidents! To divert attention, the president gave the people something to cheer for in the clean sweep at the NNPC. This is the proverbial case of someone who poured honey in your mouth but farted into it as well!
As if that was not a mouthful, news also broke that the government had introduced N10,000 and N5,000 denominations into the economy. I was at the Ikeja Shopping Mall when someone suddenly screamed, “They have killed us o! Tinubu has introduced N10,000 and N5,000 denominations o!” The whole place immediately went dead. Who does not know the implications of such a move? Mercifully, the CBN was quick to declare the information as fake news!
So, you can see that it is not every news that you must hurriedly react to if you want to keep your blood pressure in check. For me, Uromi was one of those. I simply sighed, “Aaah, Uromi, the birthplace of the Enahoros – Anthony and Peter – is in the news for the wrong reasons” and moved on. Anthony Enahoro moved the historic “Independence Now” motion in the emerging Nigerian parliament in 1953 while his brother, Peter Enahoro aka Peter Pan, remains one of the country’s most celebrated journalists and writers.
Uromi also reminded me of the Yoruba “iromi”; in my native Owo (Ogho) language where the “u” vowel starts everything, it will be pronounced “uromi”. My people say that the iromi/uromi dancing on top of the river has a drummer dictating the tunes beneath the river. In other words, there is no smoke without a fire. The massacre at Uromi could not have happened if there were no underlying causes. Unfortunately as with all things Nigeria, Nigeria immediately happened to efforts to unravel the truth. Were they innocent hunters? Or were they terrorists masquerading as such? We may never know; I mean, we may all never come to an agreement as to who they actually were.
Returning to Calpurnia, the Fulani – and their Hausa foot-soldiers – are the “princes” of the Nigerian federation while the others, especially those from the Middle Belt down to the South, are the “beggars”, difficult as this is to swallow. That is why the torrents of mindless butchering of the “beggars” have neither commanded the attention of the government nor gingered it to action. Whereas any slight calamity that happens to the “princes”, no matter how minute when compared with the horrendous afflictions visited on the “beggars” in the Middle Belt down to the South, is quickly and squarely attacked and addressed to the satisfaction of the “princes”, who must not be offended.
With one example after another ad nauseum, ad infinitum, this has become not a mistake or oversight but a deliberate and deliberative cause of action. It is politics at work – vile politics that value votes to human lives. Questions have been asked, which must be answered. Were the victims of the Uromi massacre really hunters armed with dane guns, killing lions and elephants, and found with lots of cash on them? Were there no forests in the North where they came from that they had to travel down South? Were they appropriately documented with local authorities according to extant Forestry laws operating in those states?
Pardon me! Being an apostle of Peter Abelard, I ask questions so that I can understand. Says Abelard: “Nothing can be believed unless it is first understood”. Assuming they were terrorists as alleged – or they looked like one? Yes, there are laid down rules and regulations of bringing criminals to justice and self-help is itself a crime under our laws, but where criminality trumps the law again and again and the law lies prostrate, can we in clear conscience ask the people not to take their destiny into their own hands?
The very fact that vigilantes were set up under the nose of the government and were known to law means that the necessity for their operation has been established. The State has failed to protect its citizens. The citizens have been saddled with the duty of providing for themselves what the State has failed to provide. And this is the case, not only in Uromi but all over the country, including Kano where the unfortunate hunters were said to have originated from. And can we say, in clear conscience, that there have been no mistakes or unfortunate incidents in all those other places – even with the Federal Government’s security agencies? How many times have the Nigerian Air Force apologised for mistaking innocent villagers for terrorists and wiping them out in the process?
I did not watch the gory details of how the Uromi 16 met their end – and may never do because I cannot stand such spectacles. So, you may understand that I can never root for it – not even for my enemies. But, truth be told, Uromi is just one of such bestialities that is today a common occurrence all over the place. Once human essence is deprecated, any bestiality becomes sport. Ask them in Kosovo! Witness it in Rwanda! Have you forgotten Liberia and Sierra Leone?
That is why we must never fall into that pit; once we do, it is no longer a case of John Bunyan’s he that is down needs fear no fall. The further down we are; the farther still we fall. The more gory sights we witness every day, the more our sensibilities are dulled; moreso if the victims are people known to us. If we seek to address and redress this – which I think we should before we fall irretrievably into Thomas Hobbes’s state of nature – then, selectively serving justice is not the way to go. We shall be creating weightier problems if we travel that route.
Are we not aware of the perception in the Middle Belt and the South that the “princely” status of the North has prevented the criminals in its midst from being brought to book? What, then, is the remedy left for the victims? A skewed justice system that dispenses justice with fear and favour cannot serve the course of justice. If we cry for peace from now till Armageddon without serving justice, like Peter Tosh crooned, we shall only be wasting our time. Worse than Uromi lurks around the corner.
The symptoms of a failed state are there for us all to see. Non-state actors challenge the State for control and sovereignty over its territory. Citizens have taken over tasks that the government is statutorily assigned to perform. Citizens’ confidence in the government is at its lowest ebb. Poverty, criminality, and corruption bestride the polity like a colossus. In the face of all of these, the judiciary, touted as the last hope of the common man, lies prostrate.
Google says the symptoms of a failed state include “the presence of an insurgency, extreme political corruption, overwhelming crime rates suggestive of an incapacitated police force; an impenetrable and ineffective bureaucracy, judicial ineffectiveness, military interference in politics…”. Which of these is not present in our country today? In the same way Rome was not built in a day, our problems did not just spring up in 2023 but they have steadily and stealthily crept upon us, right from Independence, like a thief in the night (Proverbs 6: 6 – 11).
If you think what we experience today is the worst, note that it doesn’t get better here; it gets worse. Our best years are always behind us. It promises to remain so until the people gain the class consciousness that victim-on-victim violence is not the solution. The repraisals threatened by misguided Northern youths fit into that narrative. The oppressors are not touched and the oppression of the oppressed is not mitigated. Instead, we have a vicious cycle of people who should forge a common front to fight their oppressors leaving the oppressors and fighting to liquidate one another, as was the case with the enemies of Jehoshaphat fought to liquidate one another without Jehoshaphat himself lifting a finger (2 Chronicles 20: 20-37).
Poverty of ideas, more than the poverty of substance, is the bane of the common man in Nigeria. Their day of liberty comes when they learn to loan one another commonsense.
Former Editor of PUNCH newspapers, Chairman of its Editorial Board and Deputy Editor-in-Chief, BOLAWOLE was also the Managing Director/Editor-in-Chief of The Westerner newsmagazine. He writes the ON THE LORD’S DAY column in the Sunday Tribune and TREASURES column in the New Telegraph newspaper on Wednesdays. He is also a public affairs analyst on radio and television.
