By Victor Adoji, Ph.d
Added to the several communities in Kogi East that have been literarily annihilated by unprovoked insurgents and rampaging gunmen, Agojeju Odo and Abejukolo in Omala Local Government have become part of the gory and escalating statistics of fatalities and arson. In the latest episode, 19+ people (including children and women) were killed, countless homes razed, an unspecified number of citizens injured, and livelihoods destroyed. As a vestige of the ensuing carnage, we are now inundated with a situation where the already multidimensionally poor are further pummeled, pulverized, and impoverished: If we cannot make their lives better, at least, let us not watch it become hell for them.
The aforesaid is unacceptable and the imprudence of government complimented by other stakeholders feel like, it is “everyman to himself”. Such temperament towards self-help will not do any good to the browbeaten victims, and onlookers and it is expedient for government to rein-in the onslaught and be profoundly intentional with its interventions, if any.
For emphasis, I wholeheartedly condemn all acts of mayhem, incendiarism, and butchery and strongly call for an unconditional end to hostilities on all fronts beginning with resolute and unswerving action on the part of government, a recourse to unpretentious engagements, honest collaborations, and broad-spectrum strategy that would include restitution for victims. It is immaterial to buck-pass, blame-game or attribute the causes (of the bedlam) at this time which is why I plead for exceptional intercession (on the part of government) and top-down/bottom-up indulgence (on the part of all stakeholders) to, inter alia, diminish the gusts of the conspiracy and complicity theories been bandied about, and ameliorating the dreadful conditions of the victims.
Led by the government, whose primary onus it is, we must do everything humanly and Godly possible to assuage the unpleasant situation especially because the unabated reoccurrences of such blitzkriegs have been adduced to mismanagement at various level of governance.
In the end, to try is to risk and not try at all is to guarantee failure. To this end, in order to confine such occurrences to our past/history, we must resolve (in our favour) these ostensibly well-planned incursions that deepen with each incidence with all that is possible: Not just words, press releases and material relieves.
*Dr. Victor Alewo Adoji, is PDP Senatorial Candidate 2023, Kogi East, Kogi State
