Casualties of a war against Nigeria
Previously published on EVERGREEN III
I can still remember where I was on October 20, 2020. It's one of those days you know you will never forget for as long as you live—a day when the world went quiet in your head and you died. I used to say it's possible to be dead and keep living—most people around me do not know that I have died a thousand times, and each time I come up much more broken than I once was.
It was on a Tuesday afternoon and I had gone with my dad to the bookstore to get some books and stationeries—I was prepping for my JAMB then. I knew the Government of Nigeria imposed a 6 p.m. curfew, but I calculated that if I spent nothing more than an hour or less in the bookstore, I should be safely home before 6 p.m. Little did I know that death doesn't wait until it's comfortable for you before it strikes.
A woman hawking drinks by my right took the bullet that was probably meant for me, and all hell broke loose. People were running helter-skelter, not knowing which way to turn or what to do. They didn't know if they were running in the direction of danger or scampering to safety; all they knew was that they needed to get away from that dead body. A dead body. Beside me.
On several occasions since that day I have wondered how that woman's family felt after hearing of her demise. She probably just went out that day to make some sales so she could feed her family, but she ended up dead by the side of the road. What a terrible way to die. And that made me wonder what would have happened if the bullet had moved some inches to the left. Would I have taken it? Where would I have taken it?
J. P. Clarke succinctly put it when he said: "The casualties are not the dead; they are the people who return from the war."
Life went on after the EndSARs and the Lekki Massacre. People cried lives were lost, but everyone went on living. Superficially, it seemed like Nigeria had forgotten what happened on that black day. The scores of people who were wounded during the protests; the people who died at Lekki tollgate that night; the woman beside me hawking drinks that afternoon at Ikorodu Garage. Life went on.
Still, some people died that day psychologically, and nothing in the world can bring them to life and make them live as they did before the heavens fell on Nigeria. They are the casualties from the EndSARs war—we all are—and most of us have been dead for so long our eyes are empty. Our laughter feels like there is a vacuum inside of us that echoes and echoes and never stops. Our hugs are lifeless, and there is no purpose anymore. We just exist.
The best part of me died with the woman on my right that day, and the fire left my eyes. I've been in therapy for almost two years and those bodies don't stop singing the National Anthem in my dream every night. And every night, in my dreams, they are shot at again and again, and they die with "Peace and Unity" on their lips. Imagine giving your life to save a nation that has never done anything good for you.
The likes of Oke, Daniel, and others died on that day. They prayed: "May Nigeria not end me," and Nigeria ended them. Brutally. Nigeria ended every one of us on that day and we will never recover from it. In this war we rage against our nation daily, we are the casualties. We that are alive. Because every day we wake up to face this war, despite what we have lost. And if that isn’t the saddest way to live, I don’t know what is.
