allAfrica.com: Nigeria: A Killing Field (Page 1 of 2)

JOSEPHINE Ejiogu, 63, mother and wife had gone to bed that night hoping to see the next dawn. She must have felt the comforting embrace of the night, wrapped in the bucolic silence of the countryside.

It was not a simple armed robbery operation. It was an execution by a killer squad. They had come for her husband, a local businessman, who runs a gas station, one of the more established fueling stations in that locality. He was not in the house.

Experience had made him more cautious about spending the night in his own home. Their first son, who had been home visiting from Germany had also gone that day to Aba, and may have been saved by that very fact. This band of executioners came, found Mrs. Ejiogu who was in the house and murdered her.

It was not the first time the execution squad had come to their home. The Ejiogu home had been invaded and violated four times since the last year. The family had literally abandoned their home after a series of targeted raids that always left them hurt and panting.

The invaders always came as armed Robbers. But the pattern seems now quite odd, for in the end, there was a deliberate targeting of the man and his family and business.

Could it be some business gone awry? Could there be more to it? Perhaps. Unable to take it anymore, Josephine Ejiogu, decided to return to her home. She was murdered; shot to death. But the point of my disquiet is that the once sacred grounds of the homeland is now so violated that great evil is beginning to characterize life, particularly in the Igbo heartland.

Violence. Impunity. A great degree of lawlessness. The village, the ancestral home, was once the refuge and sanctuary of the oppressed. If you wanted peace and quiet, you went home to the village. It was unthinkable that people would come and rob with guns.

Petty thievery, maybe, but not assassinations or armed robbery. Not the kind of increasing insecurity and sense of fragility that now defines and characterizes life in the Igbo countryside. It has become a killing field. One, which demands great and urgent attention. Nathan Ngozi Konkwo would not have known that his life would end so suddenly.

Konkwo, a graduate of Theatre Arts at the University of Calabar in the early 1980s, came to the US to resettle, and in the realistic demands of life in the United States, retrained as a nurse, and has made a life for himself. But he did not forget his homeland.

He actually longed for that vanishing home which we recreate from nostalgia. As a mark of his commitment to home, he sent his children out to Nigeria to school; to absorb the "traditions" that we have always known: respect for self; respect for elders; respect for community; awareness of the deep humane values of the Igbo world that we once knew, but which alas, is apparently vanishing as we replace it with the violent ethos that have now claimed Konkwo.

As a further demonstration of his commitment to home, Konkwo volunteered his skills and services, and joined in a voluntary medical mission to Imo state organized by the Imo State Association in the United States.

I personally have my problems with medical missions. Mostly because of their missionary mentality, and the simple fact that I have long argued that these forms of ersatz charity do not look for permanent solutions, which is what is really needed to deal with the crisis of public healthcare in our land.

But that said, it is often the product of the mission, forged out of the nobility of the soul, to help; to make a difference from a presumed position of privilege; to give back in some way and advance the common good from whence you derived the core of your being.

Nathan Konkwo felt this sense of his commitment to his land and people when he volunteered his time and skills to in the mission from the United States. Mission accomplished he did not return to his base. Not immediately, and now, not ever: rather than return with the group of volunteers, he decided to spend a little more time at home.

He was on his way to visiting his children at school when he was waylaid by masked gun-men, and they shot him, on the road between Ihitte-Uboma and Umuahia or some such forsaken place. Those who knew Nathan Ngozi Konkwo testify that he was full of laughter and good humor. A man of easy spirits.

But now, he can no longer return to his young wife and children in New Jersey, or finish the matter that kept him lingering at home.

These are not merely isolated cases, but a very incremental pattern of mindless violence that targets people of some presumed worth, and it is happening increasingly, not as an urban but a deeply local phenomenon. The devil has migrated home.

It has been driven from the cities to the idle places; the increasingly economically and socially ravaged Igbo countryside, whose rural economies have collapsed and its moral order inverted by the rise of a new generation of criminals and the rapidly criminalized.

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