USA Africa Dialogue Series - Re: STAR LAMENTATION: "Our Home Is Still Empty: Our Girls Are Yet to Be Found . . "

This is the season of pray without ceasing - and HOPE!

Chief Aluko, a man of his word is now giving us that much needed  hope   when he says that he is "certain that the Government is doing something about these our missing Chibok girls....it is just not telling us." 

 He wants us to believe. ( "One man, one wife")

Sometimes, we have to be patient  because some miracles take a long time - and it's certain that if Supreme Leader Dr. Goodluck Jonathan  can perform the right election magic (not the "NPN Magic" of 1983) and finally pull the rabbit out of his hat this election season, namely  - in advanced states of pregnancy or not, bring all of daddies' girls back, then he's certainly going to silence all his critics and win his next term,  and as we all know, the patient dog usually eats the fat juicy bone in the end...

On Saturday, 13 December 2014 03:22:32 UTC+1, Bolaji Aluko wrote:

My People:

I am certain that the Government is doing something about these our missing Chibok girls....it is just not telling us.

But it should....we need an update......even if there is really no update....that is still an "update".......then we will know that we are OOO - on our own.

I cannot breathe from the silence.

And there you have it.

Bolaji Aluko

Shaking his head

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The Home Is Still Empty

 

When your caller has not stopped yelling out your name, you cannot declare success in pretending to be hard of hearing! Those are words of wisdom in the context of Yoruba rhetorics. Someone is howling: somebody needs to hear and act! The 300 Nigerian girls are still missing; it does not make sense for life to move on. No, it does not make sense! The home is empty; the house is quiet; the girls are still missing, kept somewhere in the belly of the evil whale!

 

In my humble opinion, all political campaigns in Nigeria should be put on hold; all public celebrations and felicitations must cease. This is the time for activism. ASUU may now go on strike, and it would make sense to the civilized world; it is time for the multimillion Nigerian student population to go on public demonstration, and there would be cheers from the right thinking populace. Market women of all ethnicities, faiths, and creed should carry their traditional brooms of dissent in the long forgotten spirit of Funmilayo  Ransome-Kuti; they should defy and defile the rule of conventional wisdom and break the taboo of womanhood and femininity by invoking their sacred power of motherhood and appear in their birthday suits just to call the attention of Nigerian leadership to the pain and sorrow of the empty home. The much spoken Aba women's riot of historical proportion should take place again, not against the colonialist, but this time, in the words of David Apter, "Against The State!" It is time for organized anarchy; time is ripe for destabilization of "normalcy;" and if there is ever a time to challenge the status quo, it is now - until the girls are brought home – dead or alive!

 

My natural curiosity is agitated and my sorrow grows exponentially with the passage of time. I ask, "How can a people be people under the dispensation of shame and apathy?" "How can some politicians celebrate election victories throwing away millions of dollars on festivities when daughters of citizens are in captivity?" "How can a nation brag of being a compendium of incurably religious people with multiple Bishops, uncountable Imams, a bevy of religious clerics and a galaxy of followers, a nation that brags of being a home to scholars and intellectual juggernauts and yet no one has come up with any solution to bringing the girls home?"  I would like to hear no more sermons preached, no more shouts of the muezzin's early morning prayers, no more so-called intellectual conferences, and the braggadocio of intelligentsia should be burned in effigy if the foci of their operations and the momentum of actions are not centered on finding the innocent girls. "Shame on the medicine man," my people say, "whose child died in a broad daylight!"

 

When the girls are home, there should be no room for celebration yet; instead, we should borrow a leave from the ingenious epic of Adebayo Faleti, the creative genius, where the heroic hunter vowed he would not rest or ever return home until the remains of his hunter friend, Adebimpe Ojedokun, was recovered in the jungle, and the blood of his killer was splattered in ignominy and made a public spectacle.  His friend's killer was a lion. Indeed, the heroic hunter recovered his friend's remains, moved on to wrestle down the malevolent beast, and gave his own life in the hands of a fellow timid and spineless hunting partner who, alas, nervously shot him point blank in an attempt to shoot at the erring lion! Even if we as a people will die, let us first wrestle down and beat to submission those beasts that have violated our collective conscience, desecrated our home, and stolen our prized future, hiding them in bushes, enslaving them like war captives, raping them like animals, chaining them like circus monkeys, and selling them away like flea market merchandises.

 

We fought and conquered Ebola in Nigeria. Where is that fighting spirit? Where is our moral compass?  Where is our national dignity? Where is our collective conscience? The world is tired of our beating about the bush, of telling tales of captures and recaptures of enemies we never found; yet those enemies parade themselves on our streets and joke around our market places, laughing us to scorn!  The world is tired of our excuses and senseless circumlocutions. Whether real or fake, at least, one governor - out of 36, wept openly over the invasion of our terrestrial space, not by alien spirits but by the men and women of the underworld known as Boko Haram (Western Education/Civilization is Evil). As the sworn enemy of western civilization, BH's mission is to destroy anything that brings about a resemblance of the West. Yet, these gangsters are clad in western uniforms; they carry western arms loaded with western ammunitions, speak western languages, eat western foods, yet reactionary to and advocating the annihilation of western civilization. They are the intestinal worm that vows to kill the dog inside which it resides, forgetting that the moment the dog dies, it also dies with it!

 

The home is still empty. The girls are yet to be found. Life cannot go on this way – no, it cannot go on. Please bring the girls home. Look for their abductors. Let them pay for their evil deeds. Restore lives into the girls who are now wondering what on earth they had done to deserve such blatant abandonment by the nation that promised them liberty and abundance of living. Until they are home, we cease to be a people, a nation, a group of humans. The girls must be home. Nothing more, nothing less, and nothing else.

 

Michael O. Afolayan

 

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