Forty-six dollars on our heads
Today’s news reveals just how low the price of human life has become in Nigerian society (and the world at large?) of late. Our own al Qaeda-like Boko Haram pays its foot soldiers seven thousand naira each (about $46) to carry out every terrorist operation against us infidels. It’s forty-six dollars to put bombs in churches, schools, police stations, public recreation centers and all those places where infidels can be found.
That means the dozens of lives that have been lost: the twenty people who died in Kano on April 29, 2012, the twelve people who lost their lives in Bauchi on June 3, 2012, and the unspecified number of people who fell shot when a church was attacked on June 10, 2012 (to name a few) – all perished because someone had been paid $46! The money is not even enough to buy a goat for sallah celebrations!
As a child growing up in difficult economic conditions, I often marveled as I watched the people around me spend money on fireworks at Christmas. I wondered how a person could spend as much as fifty naira just for a flash and a sound, when my mother could make a pot of soup with two hundred naira or less! These days, I wonder how a person can spend forty-six dollars on a bomb, just a fire and an explosion (not to mention the casualties) when he could buy three bags of cement for the same amount of money. Maybe it’s because economic conditions haven’t improved, or maybe it’s because I’m not quite sane. Anyway, I continue with the story.
At the revelation of the $46 figure, religious leaders across the country have been kicking up dust, weeping and wailing uncontrollably all over the media. But the irony of the matter is that they have done little or nothing to reduce the frequency of such incidents. Just as a father certainly knows his radical children, these imams cannot say that they do not know which of their followers (sheep?) have a tendency to adopt violence either because of the belief that it pleases God, or because of the forty-something six dollars offered. . So why are they silent?
Speculations abound that even the few imams and traditional leaders who have come out to openly condemn acts of terrorism are secret supporters and sponsors (of terrorism) simply masquerading as pacifists to keep the rest of us confused. This is supported by the fact that these terrorists have to establish a base somewhere (in the domain of an imam and a traditional ruler) and they have to spend money for their operations to succeed.
Perhaps the reason for our collective inaction is part of our desire to become a martyr. ‘We’ here does not include me; I don’t plan on dying anytime soon!
Every day we are told to pray to God for his intervention, yet in his name we continue to kill each other. I wonder if the holy lands from which we borrow our religions are as soaked in blood as our country. While we profess to love God whom we have not seen, we hate our neighbor whom we see.
And as long as we don’t spread love, true love that is A WORLDWIDE LANGUAGE, there may be no end to this in the near future.