At that time King Herod caused terrible sufferings for some members of the church. He ordered soldiers to cut off the head of James, the brother of John. When Herod saw that it pleased the Jewish people, he had Peter arrested during the Festival of the Thin Bread……
Acts 12: 1-5 (CEV)
Early October 2020, Nigerian youths in the southwestern state of Lagos started an online movement against the country’s Federal Special Anti-Robbery Squad (FSARS), which is an arm of the Nigerian Police Force. This movement went from Twitter to the streets and they were able to organize, mobilise and initiate a street protest.
The Nigerian government under the administration of Muhammad Buhari responded relatively quickly to their demands in a bid to end the social unrest and get the young people to leave the streets. The protesters did not trust the government’s promises and suspected that the government only made quick fixes and false promises in order for them to abandon the protests. So they dug in and kept the pressure on the government. This face-off eventually culminated in the tragic events of the night of October20, 2020 when security operatives in military fatigues opened fire on the unarmed protesters killing over a dozen and wounding many others and this created an outrage in the country that culminated in a series of hashtags that went global within hours and received international attention. The president was derided for overseeing such a wanton killing act and his failure to respect the rights of the protesters to a peaceful gathering. The problem however is that this was not the first time the Nigerian government or the army had engaged in such acts.
In December, 2015, Human Rights Watch reported that the Nigerian soldiers had shot and killed at least 300 members of the Shiite Islamic group in Northern Nigeria. This incident generated very little outrage in Nigeria and this progressed into another incident of shootings against the same set of protesters in Kano. This time, at least 26 people were killed. The army’s defense was that the protesters had hurled rocks at the soldiers. Neither of these two shootings incidences and the others not reported here generated any form of outrage by the Nigerian populace.
This may be down to the feeling among many Southern Nigerians that whatever injustice occurs in the North, the South is somehow insulated from it. This is far from the truth based on recent events.
An issue common with people all over the world is the apathy we feel when an act of injustice occurs to people different from us or to people far away from us. We tend to go on with our lives forgetting that what goes around comes back around. Imagine that the Nigerian youths had exposed President Buhari and the army for those extrajudicial killings, imagine the Twitter sphere had been made aware of our army’s tendency to shoot live bullets at the slightest provocation, then, surely the president and the army would have known that repeating the same actions that night would attract both internal and international condemnation.
We did not do that for those people who died simply for expressing their dissatisfaction over being maligned in their own country. We did not identify with them. We kept on living our normal lives as if what befell them was happening in another universe. Now, the evil we ignored has landed in our backyard and we have suddenly found our voice.
Just like the early Christians failed James by not rising up to defend him and only speaking up when the beloved Peter was arrested, the Nigerian youths have also failed those people that died in the hands of the army over the past five years and our sudden wokeness may be interpreted as hypocrisy in some quarters.
Going forward, we need to do better. We need to always be ready to speak up for acts of injustice happening anywhere; not just in our country but worldwide for the distant evil we ignore today continues to take our silence as consent and will only grow in strength.
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