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“For the love of God: Please make this nation remember how futures are built” -Mario Cuomo, former of Governor of the state of New York in USA
Death is no longer a stranger to Nigerians – young or old. Indeed, death, even grisly death, hardly shocks kids any more. It is that bad. Within the last seven years that coincides with the reign of the All Progressives Congress (APC,) life has become so tenuous in the country that making it to a new month is now celebrated with buoyant high fives. Even for all this, some deaths remain strikingly painful, made so by their circumstances. One of such deaths was that of David Owolabi not too long ago. The circumstances of his death ought to haunt a country with soul, for a long time.
On October 1 2022, while Nigeria was marking her national day, one of her children, Olugbenga David Owolabi, was being buried in far away United States of America, in the state of Maryland. The funeral did not meet the day by chance. It was planned to be so, a pointed reproach to a country that kills her own.
A national day celebration is a reaffirmation of a country’s enduring values and obligations, a renewal of her soul. The date is identified more with hope than death and tragedy.
The burial of Owolabi, 55 on October 1,2022, Nigeria’s Independence Day, was a cry of anguish, an accusation against the state that has grossly abdicated her primary responsibility to her children. Unfortunately, at the moment, the Nigerian state seems to have lost much of her soul and compassion, to care.
In a society where wanton destruction of innocent lives has become common place, the story of David Owolabi may not have caught the attention of many. Similar deaths and killings abound. Owolabi left Nigeria for United States of America over thirty years ago. He was then a young man, in his 20s. America holds out great prospects for all who it harbours, but it broods no indolence. There is hardly a free dollar for anyone in America, citizens and immigrants alike. Even criminals in America have to be good at what they do, for sooner or later, chances are that the long arms of the law will apprehend a crook, the lousy one first.
Owolabi must therefore, have toiled and pulled himself up by booth straps. He obviously, made himself some money. All the while, interestingly, he never had his motherland, Nigeria, out of his mind. Over three decades after he left, now in his 50s, he decided to come back to Nigeria to invest. Thus, did he establish a hotel and a farm in Ogbomosho, Oyo State. That became his undoing.
Few weeks after his last visit to Nigeria, he was kidnapped alongside a young staff in his fledgling establishment. Ransome, as sizable as they come these days in Nigeria, was demanded by the kidnappers and was reportedly paid. Still, David Owolabi and his staff never came back alive. They were killed, for no just cause. His family was not only pained, as can be imagined, they were full of regret and anger. What was it that continued to pull David to Nigeria until he lost his life? The family took his body back to USA and decided to bury him on October 1,2022. It was, at once, a sorrowful symbol of David’s love for Nigeria and a protest, a testament of how Nigeria failed him.
Olugbenga David Owolabi’s case was but one among many cases of young and enterprising Nigerians killed in midlife either by criminals or by agents of the state. In all cases, the killers are rarely found or held accountable.
David Owolabi was killed by kidnappers. A different set of killers, this time terrorists, snuffed life out of a young doctor, Chinelo Megafu on the fateful night of March 28 2022 when the Abuja-Kaduna Ak 9 train was attacked by terrorists. Chinelo was the first casualty of the attack, caught by the bullet of the terrorists. Although she had managed to alert the world through her twit that the train was under heavy gun attack and that she was shot, some reprobates who received her twit responded to her and accused her of raising such alarm to diminish the accomplishment of the Buhari government that activated the Abuja-Kaduna rail transport. Such depraved minds. She painfully bled to death. A young doctor in her late 20s. Like David, Chinelo was betrayed by her country.
The case of Mr. Oguchi Unachukwu, a Germany-based Nigerian was entirely different. On July 2021, Unachukwu who had visited his home, Imo state, with his family was on his way back to Germany via Lagos. While going to the Sam Mbakwe Airport Owerri to board a flight, military personnel stopped him and his family at a checkpoint and directed them to disembark from their vehicles for a search. They complied and the search was carried out. Subsequently, an altercation ensued and a soldier reportedly shot and killed him before his family. There was no scuffle. It was an argument. There is no report that the killer serviceman was queried or sanctioned.
Few days before the mortal incident involving the Germany-based Unachukwu, soldiers had also summarily shot and killed a young entrepreneur, Noel Chigbue at the Amakohia flyover in Owerri. Imo State. The Police quoted the soldiers who killed the young man as simply saying that he violated their checkpoint rule. The sanction for that offence of violating checkpoint rule was summary execution. The victim’s wife was four months pregnant then.
In none of all these was government ever reported to have taken any step that presented any of the deaths as a horrible exception rather than a common occurrence. Indeed, in some parts of the country under the present government, specifically, in the South East, servicemen have been operating, literally, with the fictional mandate of the legendary James Bond. They seem to be on some kind of her Majesty’s service, with license to kill.
The drastic devaluation of the worth of human life in Nigeria under the watch of the All Progressives Congress (APC) and President Muhammadu Buhari, will remain a blotch on their score sheet for all times.
As the 2023 general elections draws nigh, there is need for a promise to reverse this culture of bloodletting. Nigeria must remember, or learn, “how meaningful futures are built and secured for citizens”, to borrow the admonition of the former influential Governor Mario Cuomo of New York state in USA at the 1984 Democratic convention. Of course, meaningful futures are not built with the blood of the innocent.
Restoration of the sanctity of life, as well as enthronement of the core values of civilization, of which respect for life is basic, must, as of necessity, be a critical part of the programme of any serious leadership aspiring to replace the present government. The betrayal by the state, of David Owolabi and majority of other citizens, dead or alive, cry for recompense. They do not deserve the insensitive threat by anyone, to continue on the same lane of destruction.
