Lekki Massacre: Buhari, Killer Of Three Generations?
By Oluwakayode Esan
We have a president that waged war against your grandfather in the East in the late 60s, killed and brutalized you and your parents during his regime in the mid 80s and is now killing your children today under the guise of being a reformed democrat.
The atrocities this man and his cohorts committed in Biafra is best forgotten and hidden for the sake of peace. Many of us were in secondary school or thereabouts when this same man overthrew a civilian regime and went on rampage, killing, jailing and brutalising journalists, activists and civilians all in the name of War Against Indiscipline. How can we forget those evil days. There was rejoicing in the streets of Nigeria when his military regime was kicked out by Babangida’s regime. No one at that time would have believed this same man would come back to rule Nigeria. But it goes a long way to describe our utter political bankruptcy that a despotic authoritarian could make a return in the lifetime of those so brutalized by him a few dacades ago. But such is the shortness of our memory, shortness of leaders and our desperation to believe he’s now a reformed democrat. We desperately wanted to believe, such that even after a abysmal first term, we still could not find anything better in the rotten pack of calous looters. Left with a choice between a certified thief and a certified despot, we were compelled to choose the devil we knew instead of the one we didn’t know. We chose the despot hoping for a better tomorrow. Today is that better tomorrow we’ve been praying for. Today is that better tomorrow that is eluding us as we see our protesting children hounded, locked up, and their accounts frozen.
We were kids when our grandparents were slaughtered in the East, we were young when our parent were brutalized, and now right before our eyes our children are brutalized, cowering, deleting EndSARS messages from their phone for fear of being hunted down. This is the tomorrow we’ve been waiting for, and this is the tomorrow we’re leaving for our children. Remember we went to fairly good public schools, now you have to pay for private schools through the nose for your children. We grew up with fairly regular electricity, but now our children are growing up hardly expecting electricity, knowing only the deafening sound of the generating set.
I wonder what future awaits our children…. we’ve failed them. And even when they arose to demand the right to live and not be killed, they stood alone, died alone, bled alone, while the rest are fleeing and hiding. Our children are not buying the false hope of a better tomorrow, they’re demanding a better today. The least we can do is stand with them instead of hiding our heads in the sand.
