
It’s a very sad me typing this right now. Just when I was
still trying to come to terms with the fact that $20 billion of our
commonwealth had been stolen and we weren’t ever going to get it back, since
the whistle-blower aka noisy CBN governor had been ousted, I learnt about the
gruesome killing of over 50 teenagers in a Federal Government College in Yobe
state by the Boko Haram sect with 20 girl children abducted in the process ( as
I write this, I’m pondering with fear what exactly those girls, if they are
still alive, will be going through right now). I lived in the boarding house of
a Federal Government College for three years myself and I still remember
vividly the few and far between times we heard stories like a man coming into
the hostel to rape girls and the beating of some supposed student witches by fellow students and the kind of fear those stories put me in for days and weeks. So I can’t even begin to imagine what those teenage
students experienced that dark night. I was still in shock about the incident
when I learnt the Boko Haram sect had invaded a village in Adamawa and
slaughtered over 20 people. All these in less than one week! At that point, I wasn’t
sure my heart could take any more bad news from Nigeria, preferring to just
read about happenings around the world from CNN and co. Only for me stumble
across a news item that the Federal Government had drawn up a list of 100
people for Centenary awards that will be handed out during the 100 years’ of
Nigeria.
Centenary what? I quickly found
the list on the internet and on skimming it, it dawned on me that even after 100
years of being a country- and more than 53 years of being independent- we still
don’t have a clue of what we are doing or where we are headed.