Oby Ezekwesili spits fire over killings in Benue

By Jesse Oche

Former Education minister, Dr. Oby Ezekwesili, on Monday literarily spat fire over the ongoing killings in Ngeria, specially Benue State.

Ezekwesili expressed concerns that Nigerian children were now getting used to deaths.

She warned that the Nigerian society might, one day, pay for not protecting its children.

Ezekwesili wrote on Twitter, “I remember vividly how, as children, we used to be so shaken about death.

“Then, if we heard news of death of anyone or people, we would cry so hard and be inconsolable. It did not matter whether we knew the dead or not. That was the innocence of childhood. It was healthy.

“There is nothing that gives me profound pain, as the fact that families of those of our citizens now killed daily are actually mostly left on their own to bury their dead.

“They are on their own, while the leaders of government and (the) rest of the society carry on as though all is well.”

The former minister added that “the second aspect of my profound pain at the killings that happen daily is the effect it has on children.

“The normalising of killings has fast desensitised even our little ones. There is a hard edge that is not childlike in the Nigerian children who now see death as common.

“I am afraid that our society will long pay for the deadened emotions that frequent news of killings of citizens that our children are becoming accustomed to hearing without as much as a flinch anymore.

“I have been observing the children around me and this worries me much.

“We cannot watch on as our children become used to the idea that killings are a “normal occurrence” in Nigeria.

“Ah. How can it be? We are losing our children as they lost that childhood innocence that is healthy for accumulating any society’s social capital. It breaks me.”

She warned that “the greatest disservice that Nigerian president is doing Nigerians is to not have solutions to these daily killings.

“The greater disservice is his coldness in the face of the killings. President Buhari is, by his emotional dissonance, killing the childhood innocence of our Nigerian children.

“As promised, I shall do my one-woman march against Aso Rock to protest President Buhari’s seeming tolerance of daily killings across Benue, Taraba, Zamfara, Kaduna & neighbouring states.

“I refuse to accept these killings as our new normal. No!”