Green and White: The Colors of Death and Human Rights Abuse
In all my twenty-two plus years of life, the first time I can unequivocally say I was proud of being a Nigerian was in October 2020 when the #endsars protests started. For the first time in forever, I was seeing the Nigeria I never believed we could become. Young people looking out for each other, working towards a common goal and spearheading catalytic change. It was truly a breath of fresh air. It gave me hope that old age could be a period of redemption and Nigeria could become better at 60. For the first time in forever, we were something I grew up believing we would and could never be: one.
The protesters were like a family, looking out for each other both online and offline. For once, Nigeria wasn’t a synonym for corruption, fake princes, and everything negative. With the protests, Nigeria represented positive change, the carrot the current government dangled but never delivered on.
20th October 2020, helped me relearn two lessons I always knew about Nigeria but momentarily forgot:
Dreams come here to die
Nothing here loves you.
Not the government, not the police, not the roads, not the shite power supply not even your village people.
I said it, I say it and I will keep saying it: everything in Nigeria is engineered to make you fail, from the epileptic power supply down to the bipolar internet network. Here, your dreams are not valid. From a young age, you are taught to settle for the bare minimum. When you become successful, you get branded a criminal for owning an iPhone, laptop, and/or a car and get killed for having tattoos or wearing expressive hairstyles. My country is like that toxic partner that (mortally) gaslights you for asking for what you deserve.
On 20th October, I, like many other Nigerians, watched as smiles, hopes, and dreams were snuffed out by the military. We watched as the white on our country’s flag was dyed with the blood of her innocent citizens peacefully singing as they protested the activities of a rogue police unit. That night was a long night for Nigerians. We listened as they sang the Nigerian anthem in broken voices with the staccato beat of fired rifles echoing in the background. My heart broke a million times. People’s children, partners, and parents went down that day. What was more gutting was the fact that come morning, nothing would be done about their deaths. Lucy, TonyCruz, Folorunsho Olabisi and the rest like many others before them, would become faceless and nameless statistics; some of the many victims of Nigeria. That night sleep eluded me as it did many others.
Wednesday, 21st October was a lesson in mental and psychological agony for Nigerians. On this day, I saw:
Someone’s brain, an empty cranium, and people’s children shot to death
Someone’s intestines still oozing the steam of life while its owner writhed in pain
Doctors and nurses scale fences as they fled for their lives as soldiers invaded hospitals looking for survivors of the Lekki tollgate incident.
A young boy whose legs were shot to pieces try to fix his feet back to his shattered legs and how he slumped to the blood-splattered earth when he realized his efforts were futile
The video of Lucy, a dancing protester from the night before, all smiles and so full of life and in the next slide, lying in shocked immobility, her cranium hollowed out by bullets.
The bitter lesson October 2020 taught us is that Nigeria is like that toxic partner you love from a distance and that green and white, will forever be the colors of death and sins against human rights.
I consumed so much content I could feel no more and even when I saw the tweets of a heartbroken girlfriend mourning her boyfriend who was killed few minutes after tweeting “Nigeria won’t end me”, I felt a vacuous and numb sort of pain. It is funny how someone can be alive and human one moment and be reduced to a bloody gloop of flesh, muscles, and organs the next. Many years after her 30-month menarche and the attendant genocidal killings of Igbos, Nigeria bled again at 60. We are naturally an easygoing group of people, finding humor in the most abysmal situations but on Tuesday night and the early hours of Wednesday 21st October, humor eluded us and despair eroded the little hope of change we nursed. People cursed till their voices were hoarse but two things were certain: either God was on leave or the curses, no matter how elegant their construction, were just words.
It is at times like that I understand why Sigmund Freud believed man clings to the idea of God out of the infantile need to have a father figure. I wanted someone to come in and make it stop. It was too much to bear. Way before the killings of Tuesday, 20th October 2020, I found it hard to sleep and write. The accounts and videos of the activities of SARS (Special Anti-Robbery Squad) tormented me for days. Then Tuesday night happened and I couldn’t eat, write, function nor think. It was all just too much to bear. Everyone kept saying to use your voice and craft to amplify the message, to get the whole world listening. But I just couldn’t do anything.
The funny thing is the protests weren’t political neither were they about better power supply or a better health care system. The protesters at the Lekki tollgate were demanding the right to life, an immutable fundamental human right. In a supposedly democratic society, citizens were killed for demanding the right to breathe the Nigerian air and exist in peace without constant fear for their life. In the following days, we heard an uninspiring apology from the government, and an outrageous claim that the IG live used to document everything that happened that night was photoshop.
Section 33(2)c of the Nigerian constitution states that an individual can only be deprived of their right to life for the purpose of suppressing a riot, insurrection, or mutiny. These people were doing none of the above. The protests have been so peaceful with protesters feeding each other, policemen and traffic wardens, praying and dancing with each other. The bitter lesson October 2020 taught us is that Nigeria is like that toxic partner you love from a distance and that green and white, will forever be the colors of death and sins against human rights.
As if their actions for the week were not diabolic enough, Thursday, 22nd October brought the shameful discovery of the hidden COVID-19 palliatives the government never shared. Some of them were already spoilt. Watching people cart away the goods happily, I couldn’t help wondering why these pirates didn’t share these items to the poor masses. The dictionary definition of wickedness and insensitivity is that people starved during the lockdown and the government sat on these relief items and watched them suffer. A few hours later, they were already on air, feeding the world saccharine lies about how the sharing of the palliatives was halted due to the #endsars protests whereas some foodstuffs- that have a shelf life of five months- had already gone moldy.
All these beg the questions:
Is it a sin to be Nigerian?
Is it a crime to ask for what you deserve?
Is it wrong to want to make the Nigerian reality better?
#endsars #endpolicebrutality #endbadgovernance
