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Our country our country (for Kolade Johnson)

By Tony Afejuku
05 April 2019   |   3:39 am
­What a country is our country, this country that is our country. As I write, I wonder who we are as a people and as human beings civilized enough to live in our part of the world whose inhabitants some fellows who are kind-hearted enough have endeavoured to nourish as highly bred and cultivated beings.…

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Young Kolade Johnson. Photo/fivibe

What a country is our country, this country that is our country. As I write, I wonder who we are as a people and as human beings civilized enough to live in our part of the world whose inhabitants some fellows who are kind-hearted enough have endeavoured to nourish as highly bred and cultivated beings.

These kind-hearted fellows called our land what we now bear as our country’s name. But what truly have we made of their breeding, nourishment and cultivation of us, of our country our country?

Maybe on the basis of this question you may refer to me as someone who is suffering from the disease of colonial mentality. If you think you are right to so label me, you simply are saying or must be saying that you recognize in me an overwhelming power and strength of un-patriotism.

In other words, you are simply saying or must simply be saying that you see in me an overwhelming strength and power of national disloyalty. But how overwhelmingly wrong you are!

Clearly, if you are a regular or constant reader of me here you cannot but notice glaringly that I am an overwhelming advocate of one who must do one’s duty to one’s country – meaning that all of us must do what we must for our country rightly and correctly as well cultivated patriots.

Our so-called leaders do not know this. Their appointees into several of our institutions do not also know this – or so it seems. Indeed, it is hard to identify any of our country’s public institutions that exist as a positive force that imbues us with dreams of committed patriots and of highly civilized human beings.

Let us take our country’s police force as one example of a public institution that has failed us “big time,” as the saying goes.

How many times has this force that is anything but a positive institution not demonstrated to us that at certain levels of civilization it cannot be said to exist. In truth, our police force does not exist at certain levels of civilization such as, for instance, the level of maintaining law and order decently and along the line of the officers and non-officers of the force doing their duty patriotically and as members of a modern country.

Recently, very recently, it must be stressed, our country’s Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS) murdered, “in cold blood,” again, as the saying goes, a football fan in the person of Kolade Johnson, a thirty-six years old father of a little baby girl.

The killing incident happened at Onipetesi in the Magoro area of Lagos where the murdered young man, a graduate of Business Administration of the University of Benin, went to watch a televised live-match between two English premier football teams (Liverpool and Tottenham Hotspurs) on Sunday, 31 March, 2019.

I must admit that newspaper reports of the horrific incident are of tiny value to me because of the familiar average human, or, better, inhuman behaviour of our country’s police-men. We don’t need to look closely at the eyes of our police-people before we know that they enormously differ from the journalist’s, for instance. And if there is any professional our police-people detest, it certainly is the journalist. Maybe yes. But that is another matter entirely.

I watched on television the two officers – an inspector and a sergeant – that the police high command linked to the killing of Kolade Johnson. The excuse that one of the alleged killers gave was perplexing. (In fact, it is still perplexing and will remain so in the grieving minds of especially his family-members).

The terrible SARS officers were in the alleged area of their crime allegedly to raid cultists and smokers of Indian hemp.

To succeed in their raid they had to release bullets to the sky. And how the bullets that were sky-bound touched or killed the victim was perplexing to the shooter(s). Bloody liars! Swine!

These are the police officers of our country’s civilization. No matter our tears for Kolade Johnson, no matter the well-crafted good-for-the-moment sentimental promise of the Lagos police commissioner to bring his killers to book, and his good-for-the- situation commitment to change the colour of the eyes of the average police, nothing will change sooner or later.

In fact, the Kolade Johnson incident had happened in several places in and outside Lagos City and Lagos State. Incidents such as Kolade Johnson’s will be replicated from one state to another state. This is our civilization, it is your civilization.

The eyes of Kolade Johnson’s killers which I saw on Channels Television were the eyes of rugged cultists and wholesome Igbo, that is, Indian hemp smokers who cherish chaos.

The inspector and the sergeant and other members of their SARS marauding gang who invaded Onipetesi in Magoro, Lagos clearly went there to create smoky chaos. They succeeded. And their wicked creation had its own distinctive flavour.

The alleged killers displayed no emotions of remorse maybe because the characteristic fragrances of Indian hemp were still in their smoky heads when they were paraded on television.

One can liken them to the officers and recruits and soldiers who were ordered to murder our compatriots during the presidential and other elections.

The seed of that “shoot-on-sight” order is still growing and will ever be growing in our land, in our country, our country where now we don’t know whether to continue crying or to continue laughing.

How many compatriots shall we bury before their time in this country our country, your country? Who will halt the huge events that are happening and that will happen in our country? When will light that is light shine in our country?

Many of us have learnt a good deal about the spirit of our country where power-worship or power-mongering is becoming a new religion which he who will halt it at the appointed time will halt. When is the appointed time? Patient, patient, patient, we must be.

This is what I have been told to tell you, dear compatriots. What is significant is that it will happen. What will happen, will happen – yes, yes, yes, yes and O yes, yes, yes, yes! And what will not happen, will not happen – yes, yes, yes, yes and O yes, yes, yes, yes.

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