What is the life of a Nigerian worth?

OPINION: What is the life of a Nigerian worth? – Azuka Onwuka

The dispatch with which the Federal Government intervened last week in the kidnap of Prof. Kamene Okonjo, the 82-year-old mother of the Coordinating Minister of the Economy and Minister of Finance, Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, was commendable. Within five days of her kidnap, she was released. Even though the Delta State Commissioner of Police, Mr Ikechukwu Aduba, said that no ransom was paid, there have been insinuations that a ransom was paid. But we shall leave that issue of ransom for another day. The Federal Government combined forces with the government of Delta State, with other state governors showing concern. That made life unbearable for the kidnappers. That is the way the Nigerian state should treat the safety of every Nigerian: as a national emergency.

But there is no denying that the reason such a high-level attention was paid to the kidnapping of Mrs. Okonjo was because a Very Important Person was involved. As I write, many Nigerians without political depth and magnitude are in various detention camps in many states awaiting the payment of ransom before they will be considered for release by kidnappers.

This is part of the reason Nigerians are not as committed to Nigerian issues as citizens of most other countries are. The Nigerian nation does not place a premium on their life; their life is not seen as extremely important by their nation. The lives of Nigerians are graded according to their political ranking as well as their economic and social ranking in the nation. Each person is treated according to that position he/she occupies in the scheme of things. Nigerians therefore believe that losing one’s life for Nigeria is a wasted effort, because the nation will not celebrate such a sacrifice and honour such a citizen.

Compare this with the way the British government treated the killing of a non-British citizen named Boy Adam, because his identity was unknown, whose torso was discovered in the River Thames on September 21, 2001. The British Metropolitan Police conducted some examinations on the headless and limb-less body and reached some conclusions about the dead boy: One. That he was between four and seven years old; Two. that he had only been in the UK for a few days; Three. that he originated from Nigeria, possibly from Edo State; Four. that he was not the victim of a sex-related murder but that of ritual killing.

Since tests had confirmed that “Adam” was not a British citizen, a short-sighted nation would have washed its hands off the death of the boy and focused on other “important and weighty state matters”. The thinking could have been: “After all, Blacks killing Blacks is not news; neither is it news that Africans use their fellow Africans for rituals and human sacrifice. So, why waste taxpayers’ money in search of the killers of a child that would have died of famine or war anyway? After all, did the United Kingdom and Her Majesty not spend decades and scarce resources to humanise Africans and stop them killing and eating one another with little or no results to show for all their labour of love?”

But Britain thought differently. Since the corpse of “Adam” was found within the territories of the UK, it was treated as a serious crime that needed all the attention. The British Government might not have cared about the life of the poor boy, but the fact that the boy was murdered in the UK meant that the murderers could still murder more, and the next victims could be British children. It, therefore, swung into action. The Metropolitan Police visited Edo State in search of any trace of the boy’s family. Even though the police did not find the boy’s family or the killers, it eventually caught another child trafficker in London named Kingsley Ojo, who was jailed in 2004. In March 2011, the identity of “Adam” was found out to be Ikpomwosa, a six-year-old.

One would wonder why spend such an amount of human and material resources on a non-British boy when such resources could have been pumped into another sector of the economy to make the lives of citizens better. The reason was that the British Government understands that when you make your citizen feel like a king, your citizen will put the nation first in everything, knowing that even if he or she dies defending the nation, his/her death would not be in vain.

Similarly, on October 18, 2011, Israel swapped over 1,000 Palestinians with a 25-year-old Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit. Anyone who watched that one-thousand-for-one prisoner swap between Israel and Palestine would think that Israel was gullible. If that swap looked illogical and disproportionate, what would one say about the hundreds of Palestinian and Lebanese prisoners Israel had exchanged for the remains of Israelis, like it did in July 2008 when it released Lebanese fighter, Samir al-Quntar, four Hezbollah fighters and 199 remains of Palestinian and Lebanese fighters in exchange for the remains of two Israeli soldiers: Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev? Mad? No. Israel believes that every Israeli – dead or alive – is special, no matter his or her position or status in the country. To that country, even the corpse of an Israeli is important and needs to be buried according to Jewish rites in Israel and not left in enemy territories.

The result is that every Israeli is ready to die in defence of the nation. Every scientist thinks of how to improve on Israeli scientific and technological know-how so that it can be miles ahead of other countries, especially its neighbours. Every Israeli thinks always of how to make Israel No 1. That way, the nation gains and the citizen gains in return.

But in Nigeria, it is easy to exhort the citizens with the words of the National Anthem: “Arise, o compatriots, Nigeria’s call obey; to serve our fatherland with love and strength and faith;” but when it is time to show the citizen personalised attention, care and protection, the nation is nowhere to be found. Yet, that same citizen watches the rights and privileges denied him/her shown to other citizens because of their status in the nation. The result is that the citizen is disillusioned, cynical and not motivated to do anything extra in the service of the nation. Rather he thinks only of how to grab his own “national cake” from the treasury for the purposes of taking care of himself and his immediate family.

The life of every Nigerian should be priceless. The citizen should be made to believe that the nation would do everything possible to protect and care for him wherever he is in the world. That is when the citizen will be proud that he is a Nigerian and fired up to “obey Nigeria’s call and serve his fatherland with love and strength and faith.” This is not too much to ask of Nigeria, neither is it too much to give to Nigerians. Nigeria belongs to all of us, both the governed and the leaders.

- Azuka Onwuka (azuka.brand@augustconsulting.biz)

via Punch