The Best & Worst Part Of Life? It Continues

On the Lekki massacre

Some cliches are everlasting. Life goes on & Time heals all wounds, are two of such. It has been a dark month, worse for people mourning at the moment. Each time I come across a joke or a pun on social media, I am pricked with guilt from laughing, and so I quickly scroll and remind myself that a few days ago, a young man tweeted his country would not end him, and he was stabbed to death less than three hours later.

I am consciously punishing myself, imagining what families of the deceased might be going through, and it irks me when I scroll through my once serious timeline and I am met with petty jibes, and ostentatious photos.

How quick time flies. Wasn’t it only a few days ago, we shared blooded flags in solidarity with our slain heroes.

We tweeted curses, our profanity absolved by the magnitude of injustice.

I am repulsed by the mundaneness of human existence. How easy it is to live, and how much easier it is to die.

I am shielded by distance, but my mind takes cognizance. I think of the people directly affected. The unfortunate event leaves a streak on our already tainted history.

The Lekki Massacre.

A scene replays in my mind’s eye; A mother wailing, half-blinded by her eyes swollen from crying, beating her chest and wondering what she had done wrong to deserve the curse of losing her son.

In my mind, I assign her to be Oke’s mom.

Nigeria will not end me. Oke was the young man Nigeria ended.

I try not to stare at the missing photos. I don’t want to make assumptions, even though we heard accounts from survivors of the protests. Eye-witness accounts that make you question humanity.

The utter horror that the young men and women with dreams were murdered by the men put in place to protect them. Then the multiplied grief inflicted on their families, who didn’t have the chance to say goodbye and were still robbed of the opportunity to pay their final rites.

How can I describe the disgust I feel knowing the Government is shamelessly working overtime to cover its tracks.

It is a hard story to tell. How do we explain that while the youths sat on the ground singing the national anthem and waving the Nigerian flag, soldiers walled them in and rained bullets on them? How do we explain that the soldiers stole their bodies?

But we cannot afford to forget.

History repeated itself because we didn’t pay attention to all the warning signs. For years, we were plagued with the same bigoted scheme of the government. Nothing changed in their tactics, we weren’t just paying attention.

Life goes on, is a phrase both heartwarming and dishearting.

Life is change and change is life. Alas, the journey of change is a challenging marathon.

To those who died, it would be derangement to say you sacrificed your life for a worthy cause because your life was stolen from you, and you didn’t deserve such ill-fate at the hands of the so-called leaders of your nation. Frankly, you didn’t deserve the country you died in, but we will keep the candles burning for the sake of posterity and the blameless children who are born into this country every day. We blamed our predecessors for allowing it rot to this extent, but for the sake of the next generation who had no hand in the decomposition, we will pick up the baton passed to us.

For your sake, dear slain hero, our struggle for a better country would continue at an active pace.