The Court Order! By Sunny Awhefeada

The raison d’ tre of government which is the welfare and security of the citizens remains a perennially violated concept in Nigeria. Despite the multiplicity of avowals by government officials to a commitment to the twin concept of welfare and security, what Nigerians have had to contend with in the last forty years has been to suffer the breach of what ought to have been a hallowed and reassuring credo. As a nation we have backpedalled receding uncontrollably into the Hobessian jungle where life is short, nasty and brutish. Civility and order have taken flight off our space. The organs of government that ought to maintain law and order and regulate excesses have been defanged and what has become our lot is the equivalent of the Yeatsian apocalyptic “mere anarchy is loosed upon the world” a line from that end time poem from which Chinua Achebe derived the title of Things Fall Apart his imperishable gift to postcolonial thought. Nigerians are highly religious and every morning a Nigerian leaves his house he prays to avoid trouble and also fervently wishes that trouble should not locate him. Yes, one can avoid trouble and trouble will come looking for him! Back home it is not out of place to see people thanking the omniscient for seeing them through the dangers of the day. Before settling down to a night’s sleep that is no longer sleep, people also pray not to experience the horrors of the night. Yes, the home is no longer a sanctuary as the marauders can strike within the four walls of your house with a police station or a military checkpoint less than one hundred metres away!

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My former student, younger friend and now colleague did experience the horrors of the night during the yuletide of 2024. The young man could have pub crawled or embarked on some other nightly adventures, but he chose to remain in the solitude of his apartment and ruminate on literary theory and criticism. His fertile mind must have sailed back to antiquity birthing in the vast and now almost inscrutable Classical era. He must have looked Plato, Aristotle and Socrates in the face, teased them and pulled their lush beards and inviting them to visit Abraka for further inquisition into the unending business of literary criticism. He must have chuckled on seeing Horace and Longinus telling them that Africa had sublime poetry. Samuel Johnson, Alexander Pope and Mathew Arnold would have withdrawn on seeing his knowledge suffused forehead. Of course he must have told T. S. Eliot that Africa was and remains the forte of “tradition and individual talent”. As he sails back to the recent past, Claude Levi-Strauss and Ferdinand de Saussure would have heard him talking about courses in linguistics that have illuminated the corridors of the humanities faculty at Abraka. Certainly, Jonathan Culler, Rolland Barthes and Jacques Derrida would have winked in admiration of his nimble mind and its accompanying lucidity of tongue. Home to reality of the multiplicity of hurts Nigeria unleashes, my colleague would throw robust morsels at the gatekeepers of postcolonial and eco-critical disputations with Edward Said and William Slaymaker offering thumbs up!
My young colleague was in that elevated state of academic reverie when four armed robbers broke into his residence and held him hostage for hours. Brandishing guns and threatening to kill him he was beaten black and blue with an injured eye to the point that the literary avatars he just left would not have recognized him. Forced to transfer money to a moniepoint account with a gun to his head the young don whose take home pay cannot take home was forced to call friends and family who transferred more money to him to further transfer into the armed robbers’ moniepoint account. Not done with badgering and robbing him he was dragged out of his house and taken to an isolated place for further physical and psychological torture before he was let go. By that time the sublimity of theory had given way to the harsh pragmatics of living in Nigeria defined by anxiety, fear, horror and helplessness. The young don’s ordeal was around Christmas that lacked the hitherto exciting prospects for which the season was known in time past. The night ought to have been silent, it ought to have been holy, but the marauders aided by the laidback attitude of the Nigerian system ensured that my young colleague had a bloody yuletide. The cold and windy harmattan of that night and the darkness ensuing from perennial power failure compounded my colleague’s ordeal. From the illumination of the encounters from Socrates to Slaymaker, the young don was confronted with a stygian scene. He prayed and longed for dawn at least for its vague assurance.
The victim called at the “nearest” police station to report the incident and of course he was subjected to some extortion before his statement was taken with errors that made its meaning lost to the point of irretrievability. In pain and trembling, the young victim read through the statement and rewrote everything to ensure its correctness. The cops on duty told him that he would need a court order in order for them to approach moniepoint to track the owner of the account into which the money was transferred. That would enable the police arrest the gang and make them face justice. Unfortunately, justice has become a non-existing item in Nigeria. What followed after the report at the police station has been the unending quest for the court order. My young colleague has been to the magistrate court to which the police directed him for the court order for the umpteenth time without meeting the worshipful un-magisterial magistrate. The robbery incident took place around Christmas. We have counted one, two, three, four, five…..eleven, twelve, ….sixteen days into the New Year and the court order is still being awaited. This narrative speaks to how those who should enforce law and order subvert the system by aiding and abetting crime through negligence propelled by the awareness that failure to perform a duty rarely attracts sanctions in Nigeria.

What is standing in the way of apprehending the robbers is the court order and nothing more! This inhibition of the working of the law can only be imagined to be real in a jungle. And has Nigeria not become a jungle? Between December and last week I know of five friends that had close encounters with death in the hands of armed robbers and kidnappers. They escaped by their wit and grit. They reported the matter to the police and it took the later no less than three hours to get to the scene of the crime, yet the distance from the police station to the sites, in each case, was less than a mere five minute drive! Would the robbers and kidnappers be waiting at the scene of the crime for the police to apprehend them? Certainly not! This happens all the time and the criminals are emboldened and intensify their evil acts. May be the victims were neither the sons of the president nor that big man after Farotimi! After all, was somebody not arrested the other day for “insulting” the president’s son? Was Farotimi not traced to Lagos and arrested and bundled to Ekiti for trial for “defaming” the big man? What do citizens do in the face of the failure of government and its inability to guarantee the welfare and security of the people? Let me go in search of the answer! But, before then let me find out if my friend has got the court order!