In Eruku, prayers ascended
and bullets answered first.
Church doors splintered;
a sanctuary of hope
transfigured into an altar of smoke and screams.
Three worshippers collapsed beside their Bibles,
their blood seeping like unanswered supplications
across the fissured concrete.
The pastor was dragged into the night,
his lamentations swallowed by bush paths
now highways for the damned.
Elsewhere, in the same beleaguered land,
Musa
who had dedicated his life to the green-white-green
was ensnared by ISWAP’s shadowed hands.
An ambush.
A loyal soldier struck down,
while the very soil he bled for
continued offering its children
as sacrifices to a god of ceaseless violence.
In Tsafe, a teacher’s blood
stained the blackboard,
and students, tender, unripe dreams
were plucked into darkness
like fruit stolen from a summer orchard.
Parents waited at dawn
for children who would never return
to the sun.
And in Yelwata
O Yelwata!
the night reeked of fire, gasoline, rifles, machetes.
Over two hundred souls
were scattered like broken millet in a tempest.
Three thousand fled barefoot through flames and memory,
bearing only grief upon their backs.
Among the ashes of their homes,
only bones remembered their names.
Security forces murmured
that they were “overwhelmed”
a truth, indeed,
but also a verdict upon a nation
forgetting, with each passing day,
how to protect its own.
Then Maga:
another school,
another set of daughters abducted,
while the world averted its weary gaze.
Twenty-five schoolgirls vanished,
their vacant beds still warm,
echoing the enduring horror of Chibok
a wound that refuses to scar.
And what did Ali,
crowned ringmaster of this macabre circus,
do as the nation burned?
He junketed across the globe,
smiled for cameras, shook foreign hands,
while ordinary citizens perished
at the hands of terrorists.
Ali proclaimed his depression
over the surge in violence,
vowed to bring the perpetrators to justice.
But these are hollow words,
echoes repeated each time killers strike,
empty gestures devoid of meaning.
This is the same Ali who demanded
his predecessor resign
for failing to curb insecurity.
Now that the darkness deepens under his own watch,
will he resign too?
When he speaks,
his energies are devoted to shaping narratives rather than saving lives,
arguing that the slaughter should not be called Christian genocide,
as if polishing perception
could heal a bullet wound,
as if discourse could halt a machete.
For every massacre,
justice remains elusive.
For every abduction,
no answers arrive.
For every grave,
the silence grows heavier.
Within Ali’s court,
some jesters are fingered
as sponsors of the very darkness
that devours our children.
Impunity reigns
loud, shameless, barefoot,
dancing atop the rubble of despair.
Nigeria, O Nigeria…
how long will you breathe
with a knife lodged in your throat?
Churches and mosques burn.
Schools fall silent.
Villages bleed.
And Ali and his pack of clowns
sit in their gilded halls,
calculating narratives,
while the streets run red,
while mothers cry for sons who will never return,
while children vanish into the night.
Osmund Agbo is a medical doctor and author. His works include, Black Grit, White Knuckles: The Philosophy of Black Renaissance and a fiction work titled The Velvet Court: Courtesan Chronicles. His latest works, Pray, Let the Shaman Die and Ma’am, I Do Not Come to You for Love, have just been released. He can be reached@ [email protected]