Blind Stares

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“Life itself is one big mystery

The question is…

How did we all come to be?

It’s either the evolution theory

or the story

of Adam and Eve

you can choose to believe

whichever you will

but still

so many questions remain unanswered…”

The first few lines taken off the first verse of a song I wrote back in the days of my “rap artiste” phase. It was called “Mystery” and was supposed to consolidate my then stand as a “conscious” rapper after dropping my “Sad Story” track which told the story of the cold blooded murder of Tosin-Adelugba and the duo of Morakinyo-Akerele and Nnamdi-Ekuyasi by blood thirsty, trigger-happy policemen barely a week apart.

They were murdered, not because they were armed robbers or assassins, but because in the first case Tosin happened to have boarded a bus who’s conductor chose to argue with a policeman over a twenty naira bribe and the policeman decided to shoot the conductor, but he missed and instead riddled the poor secondary school girl’s body with bullet holes. The gory sight of Tosin’s body on the pages of the following day’s edition of The Punch newspaper was more than I needed to put pen to paper. I had barely finished writing the first verse when the news broke of another very similar incident, this time it was Morakinyo, then an engineering student of the University of Lagos in his freshman year and his friend Nnamdi. According to the story, they refused to stop at a check point on their way back from a party, and when they eventually did, they were shot there and then, in cold blood by the policemen. By the time I finished writing the song and hit the studio to record, a tanker driver had also been shot by another policeman for refusing to “drop something”. All these went down sometime between May and August, 2002. However “Sad Story” did not get much airplay back then, but it did receive much acclaim within my immediate crew of underground artistes and most importantly, I had put my mind on tape and made my point.

But the actual point is the fact that we never found out if anyone was actually indicted and punished for these murders (at least I never did), as with every such occurrence in our great country Nigeria, there would be so much noise initially then it would all die down after a while, which is where the inspiration for “Mystery” came from. At the time, there was a lot going on in my head in terms of unexplained stuff, so I proceeded to ask for answers to a whole lot of questions which even till now remain unanswered. Alas the song was never recorded, but it did develop for me, a certain mind set about happenings in Nigeria… The more you look, the less you see!

And so it was, has been, and so shall it continue to be? I stand to be corrected, but I doubt if the correction will come anytime soon, because transparency is one thing that is definitely not ingrained into the consciousness of our leaders past and present or how else can one explain what the late Fela Anikulapo Kuti rightly termed as “Government Magic”. For those who may not understand it simply means our leaders’ ability and penchant for making seemingly impossible things happen and making the obvious disappear so well, that you start to wonder if it was actually there in the first instance!

Basic arithmetic and logic teaches us that in the physical sense, it is impossible to subtract a larger number of items or objects from a lower one, meaning in other words “you can’t give what you don’t have”, but using electoral mathematics a favoured candidate can get a million votes from a region with a physical population of a hundred people leading one to ask the question “who actually cast those extra votes?” I guess we all know the answer to that and I believe my point is quite clear now from this illustration. Our so called “leaders” are just a bunch of “magicians” who are very good at making unreal things appear and making real things disappear. The system breeds all kinds of mysteries, questions which never get answered, we keep hearing about on-going investigations into all sorts of incidents, but never the conclusive reports of such investigations.

But then again maybe I’m just making a mountain out of a mole hill or maybe I’m just uninformed. My people have a saying that goes thus “He who asks for directions can never lose his way” and so I shall ask that you choose not to interpret my words as that of baseless criticism, but rather as a plea for information from a confused and under-informed gentleman whose curiosity has gradually, but steadily metamorphosed into nothing better than blind stares similar to that of the visually impaired… I’m staring really hard, but I’m just not seeing much!

That said, I shall greatly appreciate it if some light is shed on just a few of my questions…

· Were the police men who shot Tosin, Morakinyo and Nnamdi and a whole lot of other innocent people ever brought to book?

· How about the Naval officer who ordered the beating and inhuman treatment of a lady for failing to give way to his convoy, was he also brought to book, and if so how was he punished?

· Bola-Ige and Funsho Williams were both murdered in their homes under circumstances which pointed at some level of insider connivance, investigations were launched, but I don’t know if anyone was ever indicted for any of these murders, does anyone know the names of the culprits and what sentences (if any) were handed to them?

· We were told that a whole lot of money was recovered from the late Sani Abacha’s family, what exactly happened to the money, meaning when and how exactly was it spent?

· Still on the subject of money and spending, I can recall quite clearly that a whole lot money was said to have been spent to revive Nigeria’s dead power sector, how come no new power stations were built and how come uninterrupted power supply is still only resident in the realms of our imaginations?

· And the most pressing question of the moment, what exactly is the state of Yar’Adua’s health, did he actually sign the budget and did he really make the controversial 5 minute phone call? Or maybe I should ask, was there actually any such phone call and why is there so much reluctance to allow the vice president handle affairs as is the natural order?

I could go on, but I guess answers to these few questions will suffice for now and in the absence of the required answers, I dare say that all I and virtually everyone else seeking for answers can lay claim to are just what we’ve always had… The asking without getting, the searching without finding, or as I would simply like to put it…

The “blind stares”!