Two dogs and a bull

Sir: One dog might find it hard to overwhelm a chained bull. For animal sport lovers, a fight between a chained bull and one dog is even. To pair up two dogs against one chained bull is totally unfair and a fraud.

As unfair, fraudulent, barbaric, foolhardy as when two soldiers were caught on tape beating, dehumanising a handicapped man in Onitsha only for wearing a military camouflage.

What is the sanctity of a dress? The scale of beatings I saw on television was breath-taking. Whoever recruited these types of people into the Army? There surely is something wrong with some soldiers in Nigeria. Those people passed off as thugs certainly not soldiers of a country. They must also be suffering from manic depression.

For as long as I can remember, soldiers have been beating people who wear military berets, khaki shorts. I know this much, I grew up in the barracks. Nobody has been able to stop this. But to beat up a cripple to the level I saw on television when same cripple didn’t hamstrung the activities of the military clearly shows the loss of our shared sense of humanity.

We need to call the action what it is; stupid; nonsense, evil. Beating that invalid must have been their way of relaxation.‬ You could see they did it gleefully without fear of a superior officer running into them as they took time to “teach the invalid a lesson.” It is cultural for Nigerian soldiers to beat people, make them sit in mud and even roll in mud.
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Ever since this video went viral I’ve been expecting a tough statement from the military authorities but as usual they temporise and engage in cloak-and-dagger attitudes of issuing grandiose statements:”This is an exception, not the norm.”

Such statements are a precursor to doing nothing.‬ That’s the military’s way after an indoor court martial. Nigeria doesn’t appear to be a country of laws. The problems of a people are not solved by the same set of thinking that created them. Our way of thinking is to use muscle power. We suffer from a frontal-lobe crisis, and is the reason that we never have pause from chaos, and rest from the roller coaster of devilry.

When are we going to clean the Nigerian garage out and de-clutter it from the barbarity of soldiers to “bloody civilians”? When are we going to reset our bull and dog matches to be one between one dog to a chained bull and not two dogs and one bull?

When can Nigerians get the best systems, good governance from people who swore to an oath to protect country and citizens? Those soldiers need to be discharged from the military without benefits and jailed. Anything short of this is humbug.

Simon Abah wrote from Port Harcourt.