Sound travels fast, then light, then
matter. The newspaper reports don’t tell you this. They don’t tell you ten meters
from a blast it feels like the apocalypse. It feels like the end.
They cannot tell you about the
tension, the anxiety, the fear. No one mentions that our rescue system was
wheelbarrows used to transport victims; they wouldn't reveal that ambulances
were cars of passersby who were willing to stop and help.
The news must have forgotten to mention
that 118,200 or 250 dead, that those figures are one. one way of putting
together everything; One way of condensing family, friends, classmates,
colleagues and loved ones. They forget to mention that numbers are a way of
turning a hundred different stories into a numerical index that says nothing.
No one tells you of the smell of
death in the corridors of the morgues, lined with bodies as you try to make
your way around, to find friends who never came back home. They don’t tell you of
hope, how you hope to not find your loved ones carelessly packed on the cold
floor of this room but pray you do, because you know after searching through
the casualty wards whatever you find now would mean the end and not finding
at all would mean worse, it would mean never knowing, never forgiving yourself
for giving up because you feel you tried but didn't do enough.
Why have i chosen to tell you this,
it is neither to earn sympathy nor stir anger. It is to open our minds to the
things we need. It would be insanity to say the government is doing nothing,
but it wouldn't be wrong to suggest they are not doing enough. We are so busy
fighting terror we have forgotten that we need to control it’s effects. In a
nation wrought with this level of insurgence is it not illogical that our
medical system still does not have rescue ambulances, that there are almost no
paramedics. That on explosion it is the police and fire service only that
respond, that most of us died because of the long hospital drive. As much as we
spend massively on security because we need too, we should spend even more on
health, because we have to. We do not want Nigerians to only shake their heads,
comment on our post and share our pictures. We want these seven deaths to save
a million lives.
May God grant us the fortitude to
bear our loss, the faith to not question and the grace to forgive a nation that
promised to protect us but didn’t.
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