Come, Let Us Kill The Children

by Michael Ewetuga

The sun, when its in its best element, is a beauty to behold, the messenger that heralds a new dawn, the fire that is blazing ever so beautifully in the sky.

The sun lightens the dark sky, when it comes out in all its glory darkness has nowhere to hide. If you have ever looked up in a moonless night you will know what brightness the sun brings to the world.

Sometimes I look up in the morning and I see the birds flying joyously across the sky, a curious look at the flowers depicts the beauty of nature.

I sat down watching snails moving about when I was a child, their elongated eyes was a thing of wonder to me, the tortoise was also a thing of wonder when it takes its head into its shell.

I have been at the ocean and wonder at the power of the sea, strong enough to take you into it’s belly and snuff life out of you, it has such energy and sometimes I marvel at the gentility of the ocean as it comes lapping at my feet the few times I was there and yet in its gentility it could be deadly.

A child in its mom’s belly is a promise unborn, a future yet to be unraveled, and a dream yet to start. I am not a woman but I know as a father that a 9 month wait is a long wait even then; it comes upon you suddenly despite the expectation. I have watched a child move in its abode, secured in its mom’s belly.

Children are wonderful creatures, and if you have them you know how wonderful they could be. They make me laugh, mine and others, children are just plainly adorable. Innocent souls that we ought to water like delicate flowers so they can grow up to be the inheritors of our dreams and aspirations, picking up where we left off, making the future a better place for the whole of humanity.

Nature is not always friendly sometimes it could be deadly and our lives are nothing when nature angrily demand them.

Nature was at its worst recently in China, a lot of people paid the supreme price when the land shook and opened up taking into its belly unsuspecting people, people who woke up that day going about their businesses with plans for tomorrow not knowing that the cold hand of death would gently rest on their shoulders before the day grows out of infancy.

People were buried under the debris left behind by the earthquake; more than fifty thousand lives were wasted. Promises and dreams were shattered, some promising lives took a hurried exit and left us to the intricacies of tomorrow. Their death is our sorrow; we are saddened by this huge loss of tomorrow promises and can only hope that nature would not play such a ruthless joke on humanity in China or anywhere else in the world.

When lives are lost to nature we at least acknowledges its powers over the human race and perhaps we can stomach that and declare it unavoidable, the tragedy in Nigeria however is a continuation of the evidence of the barbaric ways of governance and of course utter disrespect for human lives by the gorillas posing as leaders in that country.

According to the story from a place I sadly refer to as home, the government, not sure if it was state or local government, decided to either widen the roads or patch it up like they usually do when they want to steal millions of dollars.

One of the earth moving machines they were using punctured a pipeline which caught fire. Hundreds of people were reported dead, mostly children, as a result of this avoidable recklessness.

Makes you wonder if the tiers of government in Nigeria share information. The pipeline is the property of the federal government; the contractors were probably working for state or local government. It blows one’s mind that they were ignorant of the fact that they were digging close to a pipeline.

One could rage against the government as we have done for years but our cries are like an unintelligible wailing of idiots. We could make a laundry list of the detrimental actions and/or inactions of the government vis-a- vis the well being of the citizenry in that country but would that change anything? I’m afraid not. Those before us as well as our generation have shouted ourselves hoarse, but from military to civilian, it’s been business as usual.

It is funny when I read that some people were rescued and taken to the hospital, they might as well leave them to die for the simple reason that there would be no care for them at the hospital anyway as they have been declared a mere consulting clinic long ago.

When avoidable tragedy, such as the one under discuss, occurs one could liken it to a scenario where the thieves clothed in the appellation of leaders sat down with an agenda to eliminate the children of the teeming poor people of Africa. They might as well sit down and declare “come, let us kill the children, not just any child but the children of the poor and the helpless”.

I tried to sleep after being told and subsequently reading the story, I tossed and tossed, angry that there is nothing I can do to bring the children back or prevent such tragedy from happening in the future.

There is no better way to end this article than quoting George Santayana:

Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

May the souls of the departed rest in peace.

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