By Babafemi Ojudu
For days now, I have lived under a cloud of depression since the news broke about the abduction of those innocent schoolchildren and their teachers in Ogbomoso. But it was that horrifying video of the mathematics teacher being murdered that finally shattered me.
How does a human being place a knife on the neck of another human being and slaughter him like a ram prepared for Ileya?
A harmless man. A law-abiding citizen. A teacher whose only “crime” was going to work to educate the future of our country. A father trying to provide for his family. A man whose chalk and blackboard were his weapons against ignorance.
Those eyes.
Those tears streaming helplessly down his face in his final moments.
They pierced my soul.
Since watching that video, writing has become difficult. Food has lost its taste. Sleep has abandoned me. My spirit has been restless. I have snapped at people. Irritated by almost everything around me.
Why? Why have we become this numb as a people? Why has evil become so casual in our land?
And while these innocent children — some barely two, four, or five years old — and their terrified teachers endure horror in forests and wilderness, we politicians continue jumping from one primary election to another, consumed by ambition, permutations, and calculations of power, as though nothing has happened.
No pause.
No national mourning.
No collective outrage worthy of this tragedy.
Has nobody stopped to think of those children?
How do they eat?
What water do they drink?
Where do they sleep when the rain falls?
How do innocent minds process such terror?
How does a teacher comfort frightened children while staring death in the face himself?
And we are not outraged?
Life simply goes on?
We move from one political meeting to another, one rally to another, one television appearance to another, while innocent souls are held in the wilderness between life and death.
Politics
No.
This is more than insecurity.
This is war.
War against our humanity.
War against our collective conscience.
War against the very soul of our nation.
And if this does not shake us, if this does not awaken our leaders and stir our people into action, then perhaps we are losing something even greater than territory — we are losing our capacity to feel.
We can no longer afford to sleep peacefully while innocence is dragged into forests and slaughtered before our eyes.
May God comfort those children wherever they are tonight.
May He console the families already broken by grief.
And may He awaken this nation before darkness completely swallows us.
Senator Ojudu, accomplished Journalist, was Presidential Political Adviser to former Vice President Professor Yemi Obasanjo
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