By Steve Nwosu
I am writing this piece on the same laptop that I have been using for some three years now. And at this very moment, I haven’t the foggiest idea of where I threw the receipt for its purchase. In fact, I can’t remember if I was ever issued a receipt.
But as I sit here, writing the stuff our government apologists would love to describe as ‘Hate Speech’, the reality of the risk I run suddenly dawned on me: What if some taskforce people storm my house right now, demanding the receipt for the computer? How do I convince them that it is not one of the gadgets from Tech shop at the beginning of the street, which was attacked in the wee hours of last Friday – in spite of the curfew imposed by the Lagos State governor? If I didn’t join in the direct looting, I probably waited to buy the stolen goods – a crime as serious as actually doing the stealing yourself.
And as my imagination began to run wild, my gaze fell on the 40-inch television, still inside its carton, just by the dining table. For several months now, my technician friend and I have been procrastinating over when to mount it. The same goes for yet another television set (a Christmas gift from some corporate friends of mine), which my kids are yet to decide whether to install in guestroom or the family lounge.
All of them are still in their cartons, almost one whole year after they were brought. Now, just imagine Gov. Babajide Sanwo-Olu decides toe the path of his colleagues in Kaduna and Adamawa or Cross River, and his men came visiting! How do I convince anybody that I was not part of the mob that looted the Circle Mall down the road, and razed the Shoprite store therein? How would some home owner in my shoes, living in Adamawa, stop Gov. Fintiri from pulling down his house and revoking his C of O?
A few years ago, while clearing the pantry in my old apartment, I discovered that an old travelling into which I used to throw all manner of receipts, invoices and other such documents had gotten damp and become one massive nursery for rats and roaches. With goose-bumps of irritation literally dropping off my skin, I managed to truck the bag to the refuse dump, where I immediately set fire to bag and content.
That fire would eventually come to haunt me when the six years old family deep freezer needed to be taken out for repairs and the stop-and-search police demanded to see the receipt. The freezer, meanwhile was presumed a stolen property, which could only be released on my producing evidence of purchase. Of course there was no receipt anymore.
That freezer is still ‘in detention’ till this day. It may have even become another victim of extrajudicial ‘execution’, or serving term in the beer parlour of some policeman’s concubine.
Summary of it all is: we’re all Awaiting Trial Inmates. The only difference is that some of us are still walking about free.
Now, this aberration is set to become our new reality, as state governors move to restore sanity and arrest the widespread breakdown of law and other by hoodlums who hijacked the otherwise non-violent #ENDSARS protests across the country.
Yes, without playing any martial music to enable us prepare our minds for what is ahead, our ‘democratically elected’ governors are rolling out all manner of martial laws in the states, as they try to respond to the now-epidemic looting going on in the states.
Apart from the curfews currently in effect in no fewer than 12 states, Kaduna, Cross River, Adamawa, Osun, Anambra, Taraba and Kwara have either commenced, or served notice of commencement of, house-to-house search for looted items and felons.
I can only imagine what new level of rights abuse we’re about to unleash on hapless citizens. How the police, soldiers and other security operatives would latch on these new powers to settle scores with targeted families and youths, who dared to call for an end to SARS and police brutality – and whose #ENDSARS protest has landed us in the present sorry pass.
And the governors are not lone travellers on this dangerous, though not too unfair, path. In fact, Inspector of Police, Mohammed Adamu, is probably the only one not threatening us with clampdown, since the unfortunate disruption of the youth protests. All the army, starting from the Chief of Army Staff Tukur Burutai, has done is issue threat after threat, at one point denying any involvement in the Lekki shooting, and at another time carrying on like it owed nobody any explanations. In all, the strain of aloofness, and disdain (for prying, pesky and inquisitive public) that runs through virtually all official statements is so obvious that one can almost touch it with the fingers.
Like our elders say, the baby goat learns to chew by watching the movements of its mother’s mouth. So, I guess the army was following in the footsteps of its commander-in-Chief, who happens to be the President.
But we have a president not given to off-the-cuff statements, let alone speeches. In fact, the only times I’ve ever seen PMB not reading from a prepared speech are the brief exchanges of greetings before meetings. Of course, I wouldn’t know how his BBC and VOA Hausa service interviews are conducted. So, I won’t speak about those ones. But someone would soon tell me that speaking ‘is not the President’s style’.
So, even when the protests, culminating in the controversial show of shame at the Lekki Tollgate penultimate Tuesday, had presented a gold platter of opportunities for our president to seize the stage, make a moving extempore, straight-from-the-heart speech, and positively change the narrative, PMB maintained a curious silence.
And, finally, when we literally used pliers to pull the words out of his mouth, it was an unmitigated anticlimax. The president did very little to veil his own threat, contained in that less-than-15-minute broadcast that had neither spark nor spackle. It was as though PMB was under severe pains (and regret) for having acceded to the request to disband SARS in the first place. Clearly, he sounded like: having disbanded SARS, the protesting youths (nay, Nigerians in general) have no right to demand anything else of him for the remainder his second term in office. Agreeing to disband SARS already seemed too much concession for an Army General. Anything else, according to the military handbook he was raised on, would amount to weakness on his part. It was of little relevance that he’s now running a country, and not just commanding one small military cantonment.
And flowing from that, many of our elected and appointed pseudo-dictators are now unleashing their dragons on us.
Increasingly, it’s looking like our government has nothing to offer outside of brute force.
We delude ourselves saying the Army is only trained to kill and deploy maximum force. That they are not trained for civil operations. Big lie! If the army was all about brute force, we would not have such concepts as officer and gentleman, which the rednecks so jealously covet. If we have a failed and incompetent army, let us say so – instead of giving the noble profession of soldiering a bad name. Why do our soldiers (and police) come back from UN peacekeeping missions so generously garlanded, if all they ever did there was to open fire on unarmed civilians?
Let me stop here, before someone asks me: wey your receipt?”.
