Nigeria Died Tonight
On Black Tuesday, 20th October 2020
There are many things one can’t foresee, like knowing my father would pass on so soon, or that in choosing the date of his burial, the Ondo State elections wouldn’t be our family’s biggest problem. I recall how we sat at a family meeting to strategize and decide on having the funeral rites two weeks after the Ondo State election. We imagined that the election could turn out bloody and soldiers could be deployed to the State. We imagined that setting the date 2 weeks after the election was a wise decision — if our worst fears were realized, we had two weeks to re-strategize and adjust our plans.
But nobody foresaw that a peaceful protest by Nigerian youth, all but ignored by the Nigerian President Gen. Muhammad Buhari, would degenerate into the unfortunate event of Tuesday, 20th of October 2020. I had anticipated a faceoff at some point in the standoff going on with the Nigerian government. I had followed the online activities of the millions of young people organizing the protests in the most peaceable way they possibly could while making clear demands of their elected leaders. I had shuddered with revulsion at some of the stories of police brutality that came out in the wake of the #EndSARS protests and the senseless killings that had still gone on in a few places despite the media outcry … but an all-out mercenary style engagement of unarmed youths leaving scores dead, was one I had not expected. Knowing Gen. Buhari and his military ways, I anticipated that at some point the military would be brought in to maintain order, I had imagined tear gas and projectiles between Police and protesters. Others had imagined this too and prepared for it, we had relaxed in the knowledge that a sit-out, carrying the Nigerian flag would communicate our collective intention that we weren’t out to forment trouble … but what happened to the Lekki toll gate protesters; or the military’s social media response denying knowledge of the macabre event, broke all hearts in Nigeria and beyond her shores.
I wouldn’t have imagined that I would be stranded in another town, 6 villages away from my father’s corpse, stuck on the other side with angry youths in the way insisting that they deserved better leadership than what they were getting from Gen. Buhari’s mostly insensitive and feckless leadership. None of us as a family would’ve have imagined that our best laid plans would go awry from a ‘black swan’ event outside our cone of predictive abilities and beyond our collective power. But the inconvenience I feel, and indeed my family feels, is infinitesimal to the pain majority of Nigerians have had to endure in one night of the absolute worst decision a national government could take. The grief we feel right now having lost a father so dear to us all, cannot be compared to that of fathers and mothers and siblings and friends that have lost the hope of their futures in this unfortunate incident. The sadder dimension being that they are forever condemned to watching replays of videos of people shouting and taking cover surrounded by periodic outbursts of heavy artillery; or remembering images of heavy caliber shell casings, some of which must have found their sinister paths into the bodies of young men and women, and piercing into the very soul of this nation.
Today, we weep, not for our own departed but for the soul of the nation. Today, we forget for a moment that our best laid plans are shot, we join the living and the dead in louder chants for change. Today, the government at hand has shown its hand and we can see that it is stained with blood. Today we are resolute, more than ever before that however this present moment plays out in becoming history, it will spell the end of the old guard in a nation full of promises, but steered by the wretched of the earth.
A wheels of a revolution cannot be stopped. In the memory of all the blood that has watered the parched earth beneath our feet, I pray that this time, its wheels take us to the destination we have prayed and hoped and fought and died for.
God bless Nigeria and the memory of my father who waits with us as we watch how all this will play out.
