Tears are Two a Penny

At what point do we become inured to pain and suffering? When does the news of multiple deaths become just another headline? When do we stop feeling? When do we lose all sense of responsibility?

I ask these questions because I think the people we have left in charge of our security and governance seem to have reached that point. You may disagree because of the widely circulated pictures of Goodluck Jonathan weeping at the Dana Plane crash site and the news reports of the Minister, Stella Oduah breaking down in tears also at the same site. Remember Diezani Allison Madueke wept like a baby over the state of our roads a couple of years ago when she was the Minister of Transportation. If my memory serves me well, I don’t recall any tangible improvement in the state of those roads that caused so much sadness for the ‘tender-hearted’ Minister. I wonder if she’s been weeping again over the embezzlement of N1.7trn in sham fuel subsidy payments under her watch as Minister of Petroleum Resources; or the recent $3m bribery scandal making the rounds as a result of the same subsidy palaver.

The Dana Plane crash killed over 150 people in a matter of minutes and yes it is cause for deep sadness and maybe that is why the President wept. However, has anybody taken the time to calculate the death toll from Boko Haram attacks since the beginning of 2012? Has the President gone to each bomb site to weep too? Have the Minister of Internal Affairs and the Inspector General of Police gone to all the sites of bombings and shootings to commiserate with tears in their eyes? Have they decided to urgently review the training of our security operatives? Have they sacked the police commissioners of the respective states where the murders have become prevalent? Are they reviewing the country’s response as a whole to terrorist attacks? Has the Senate asked some security chiefs to step aside as Harold Demuren of the Nigerian Civil Aviation Authority was ordered to after the plane crash? What exactly is our Government doing to stop Boko Haram's killing spree? I ask these questions in light of the flurry of activities and declarations that attended the tragedy of June 3^rd. 

It is sad to say this but I think the major reason for the outpouring of grief by people in high office over the fatalities of Sunday June 3 2012 is because the victims had names by virtue of who they were in life and the sort of accident that claimed their lives (no plane carries people without a manifest detailing the identities of passenger and crew members). When you are confronted with names and pictures; proof that these people lived, that they once were but are no more; when you hear testimony from friends and family who have a VOICE; it is hard to not to feel anything even if you belong to the highly insensitive Nigerian ruling class.

However, I don’t think this is the case in the incessant mass murders taking place in the North Eastern part of the country. Even the print media doesn’t bother with naming victims, they are sometimes described as ‘villagers’ or ‘worshippers’ (when the attack takes place in a church) but more often than not, the dead are seemingly ‘nameless’ and ‘faceless’, ironically like their killers whom Government officials routinely describe as ‘faceless elements’. Most of the victims of Boko Haram do not have friends and family who can be heard so there is apparently no tangible evidence of life before it became extinct and so our President can offer the usual hackneyed condolences and the bare faced lie that ‘we are winning the war on terror’ and go on his merry way as if nothing happened.

I am not trying to diminish the loss and sorrow caused by the Plane crash of Sunday June 3^rd; I am only trying to tell Nigerians not to be deceived into thinking that our Government cares because the President and the Minister wept in public. I do not want us to be distracted by all the motion without movement; the purposeless activity which has become the stock response to national tragedies and scandals alike. I want us to collectively demand that our leaders fulfill their roles and stop playacting.  

 I am asking those in authority to develop real empathy for the people they govern. I want them to become effective leaders, willing to act out of compassion. Real leaders empathize and then ACT. Remember that Jesus wept when He heard that Lazarus had died but then He went on to raise Lazarus from the dead (I know some of you are thinking ‘but that was a miracle’ the moral to be taken from this story is that HE DID something positive borne out of compassion). Weeping with the bereaved is all well and good but ensuring that people are not needlessly bereaved is even better.  If tears are all we can expect from the people we have entrusted our lives to, then we are in a very sad situation. Indeed, if tears are the best our Government can do for us as a people, then Mr. Jonathan’s aides should quickly order containers of cotton handkerchiefs for the President and his Ministers because, in Nigeria, preventable human tragedies occur every day on a large scale, it’s just that some victims have ‘names’ and ‘faces’ and others don’t.