Dying Alive!

It is less painful when an ailing sibling dies because you have already predicted, death is their likely visitor. But it is severely heartbreaking and wounding to have a loved one just said goodbye and went, expecting to be back, moments ago, you receive the news of their death. He did not come back alive because he was killed in an untimely death of Boko Haram attack.

Anticipating death helps the family of the deceased defuse later distress. But when the death is unexpected, the grief is likely to be longer and more severe. This is also less devastating if the family could identify the body of their brother, than having the body becoming human debris, missing from the confusion of bombardments, flesh went pieces, burnt, charred and disfigured and all of it went as “collateral damage.”

This exactly captures the situation we found ourselves in Kano. The news of my sister’s situation in Koki Quarters left me emotionally disturbed, feeling dejected and unworthy, losing all appetite for life. I wasn’t the member of her family who lost fifteen brothers in recent devastating Kano bomb blast by Boko Haram insurgents, who also stood behind and shelled fire at those who attempted  to run for survival. I only experienced, by imaginary, what it has been for her family when I assumed the role of being a bloodline. It’s a severe depression, a mental illness in which a person experiences “deep unshakable sadness and diminished interest” in nearly all activities. In this state, people have feelings of despair, hopelessness, and worthlessness. Very recently I was just dragging my life from such debilitating mood disorder.

That would not have been the gravest suffering and agony if members of a family would not be living dead, (of which we are ) with their brothers killed, some went missing, their daughters abducted, always with the hpes of meeting them again, and worry gnawing deep into their hearts. The anguish unleashed to the pitiful Chibok community readily comes to mind.

Psychologists will tell you the suffering: like dying patients, bereaved families go through stages of denial and acceptance. They typically cry, howling their body on the ground, rolling this way and that, rhythming in agony and mad grief, hands over heads, lump chocked up their throats, lips pulled back in resentments,  sobbing and often screaming “hei” in denials. They also have difficulty sleeping, and lose their appetites, nightmares of the loved ones hunting back in their dreams.  Later, the grief may turn to depression, which sometimes occurs when conventional forms of “social support have ceased and outsiders are no longer offering help and solace” (thanks to the #BringBackOurGirls Campaigners and those who offer financial assistance and soothing words to all the victims in Kano and everywhere). Finally, the members of the family begin to feel more troubled, worthless and their energy drained as well as any glimmer of hope. In a setting like ours, they are to the government,  inconsequential citizens whose life or death has no meaning to the larger society. From this, they feel removed from the shade of this tree called humanity.

No other torture and suffering could hurt minds than to inflict sorrows and pains by separating loved ones from their family and deny the victims to tell their sorrows in an organized suppression by the nation’s politicians to preserve their fragile image abroad. Living day in day out, with the hope their children would one day return. People are coerced to live in pent-up emotions, a load that burns more than hell - forcing one to die in an untold agony. We have to sympathize with the parents in Chibok community, those family of nobody whose situation would have been closed, leaving them living dead without the compassion of the #BringBackOurGirls campaigners.

Thanatologists (those who study the surroundings and inner experiences of persons near death, of course we are) have identified several stages through which dying persons go: denial (no, not me!) the parents in Chibok and the bereaved families in kano will be murmuring in anguish; confrontation and bargaining (why me?); regret (If I am not Nigerian, because government failed to protect my brothers and sisters, then  I can live); depression (What's the use?; acceptance (death) of which one finally dies, a dying alive, life being intermingled with feelings of hopelessness, despair, permanent sorrow and anguish.

You just can’t understand the pain until one of your daughters, sons or brothers is among those missed in  human debris or abducted which only means a statistics to the nation’s officials. There would be no monument to engrave their names in memoriam, just like those killed  in 9/11 attack. We have no worthy in the eyes of our politicians, as we are dying, they are celebrating their anniversary in Villa while some are scheming their ways into the public offices.

That unperturbed gesture of the officials has been eating up to the helpless Chiboks’ minds, their peace, and causes a lot of sleepless and restless nights. Solace no matter how little has been pasted on the faces of these grieving parents. At least, their tragedy is televised.  

Boko Haram has been successfully carrying out attacks on mosques, churches, motor parks, schools and market squares and there have been reports that Nigerian forces have shown apparent fears and fled the war front for inadequacy of competitive equipments.  These demented people are very determined to decimate all ‘infidels,’ their associates and any perceived symbols of an enemy from the surface of the earth: including you and me, Abdullahi and Zakariyya, Emeka and John, Hafsa and Blessing, and anybody who goes to college to pursue formal education, even when it means Aminu kano College of Shari’a and Islamic Studies. They have no tendency for peace. They have no second thought for dialogue to cease their bullets downpour.

We are living-dead because we live in shocking dread and uncertainty. While one is going out, his family is not sure of his return the next moment. These days we are told “goodbye” by our families, but deep down their mood we can sense their worry and unspoken fear.  Any time we hear an explosion, we don’t get composed again until we really found out it has been a tyre puncture.  A slight door bang generates apparent panic, and people will just not be sure until they don’t see the wall crumpling. This is the kind of, dreadful, life we experience. We are like condemned prisoners awaiting executions, now or later.

We just can’t continue to live in such fears, resting our lives on the authority that has failed and would continue to fail, out of negligence, to protect us.  We must protect ourselves because it has become necessary, an obligatory or else we are just delaying our tomorrow, which will definitely arrive. Saving our lives is a task that must be done. We will not continue to live at the mercy of the militia. We will run no more.

Some analysts have the view that Nigeria is a country of one-hundred-and-sixty million cowards, mainly the country of online activists; nobody wants to lead to change the country. It has come silently, we could not build an ‘amen’ civilization where angels would descend from heaven to do the work for us.

Nigerians are smart and God is no fool. God in his mercy wants us to do the work ourselves. Devils have emerged that have no regrets killing us. The first law of nature is that of self-preservation. We shall protect our lives, as we meet death every day, everywhere.

Boko Haram is a movement that comes to stay with us for the bad and for the good. It will stay long before we can erase the elements that created it like it took long time hatching before it finally exploded. We will suffer from it and die of it, which the experiences will change our lives forever. It awakens us from our dormant security insensitivity; learn new experiences about weaponized violence by the state operatives and the insurgents as well, political awareness, alertness and militarization of almost  all social life now that civilians have the guts to confront armed officers and even members of the militia  barehanded. 

Grief is what brings together disunity into unity. Boko Haram’s devastations doesn’t recognize Muslim or Christian, thus we must come together to fight these marauding forces and after we defeated them, then we look internally and squash all the elements that helped create the insurgency, their siblings, the national coalition of looters whose malfunction is the consequence of  our misery, who create our disunity on regional and ethnic division to enhance their continuing rape of our lives. That experience we gather from Boko Haram insurgency will be good for us, an opening door to fight any injustice from Boko Haram to corruption Haram.

But if you think Boko Haram is contesting for northern Nigeria alone, that it gladdens you when they kill people - you get it wrong. Boko Haram is a deadly endemic Ebola - it will consume the whole country. It started from Borno, then Yobe, then Bauchi, then Kano, etc, day by day, gradually. Their intention is to put the whole country under their rule.

This might be your, very elusive, dream that when Boko Haram has finished up the north, you have a valid reason to separate. You also miss the point again. Do not allow your intelligence to be draped into this hallucinating, dead-before-arrival dream – the stillborn. There are interests more powerful than yours. If you are the Shariffs from northern aristocratic family (although widely suspected as the sponsor of the Boko Haram) owning oil blocs in the south or have been the protégé of the president, you wouldn’t have thought of this. You now want to say that powerful people, Abuja-based northerners with the many oil rigs and their southern accomplice would allow their business to suffer.  You won’t even get any support from other African leaders because that might trigger other secessionist movements. You see, those powerful have their own interests to protect – not yours.

I have no rue if these people decide to split the country, but I only believe that they would never ever come close to this. Then whom would our politicans tell us are the scapegoats of our failures if the country split, meanwhile even the gullible masses would can understand that they are the real culprits. You know, your thieving politicians always tell you that northerners are the bad guys for your underdevelopment, to smartly show you their innocence by wiping their dirty hands on others, just to get away with their loot.

Politicians are always friends; they have the common cause of raping the country in a turn-to-turn stealing between the elites of the north and their southern counterparts through a corrupt channel called “zoning.” It has been Obasanjo, he expired and the ‘almajiri’ replaced him. When he died, the previously-son-of-pauper came. He might win in the 2015 presidential poll because of factors of internal crisis of the opposition, ethnic and regional divides of the voters and worst still, the rigging. We shouldn’t contest this that when he is leaving Aso Rock after another term, it wouldn’t be the Jonathans again. He would invite an heir from the north to continue the ‘good work’ he has been doing. They will continue to loot all of us irrespective of religion, region and place of origin while we remain their fanatic ethnic compatriots. They will continue with their tactical maneuver of divide-and-rule-and-loot. What we see is a war and what they see is a way of enriching their bank accounts – making us living dead!

Abubakar Sulaiman Muhd is a commentator and Nigerian blogger.

(abubaksrsulai13)