Dear Bamise Ayanwole

By Omoh Giwa

Dear Bamise Ayanwole,

The unfortunate incident that led to your untimely and painful demise hurt many Nigerians though it would seem as if we have moved on to less intrusive issues like the brain-resetting slap that was served hot to a First Lady. You boarded a Bus Rapid Transit popularly known as BRT headed to Oshodi yet you did not arrive safely at your destination. Anyone would believe this public transport system safe, however instead of alighting at your bus stop, you crossed to the Afterlife. I am saddened that a bright light was snuffed before it had had its time to shine and it worries me. Who’s next?

I cannot but mention our tragic reaction to tyranny, corruption and social injustices, dissociation and avoidance is our coping mechanism to our collective trauma. We have taken the biblical directive of; if they slap you on one cheek, turn the other one, literally because how do you account for our silence and docility? In our defence, it might be our shared experience of pain and trauma in varying degrees from several ethnic clashes, civil war, religious terrorism, insecurity, economic hardship and more recently a deluge of murders and ritual killings is the cause of our flighty and temporary agitations against political and social injustice. We rant about a tragic occurrence but quickly move on to less calamitous topics as we have accepted the chaos that is Nigeria. You don’t believe me? Consider the initial public outrage over bullying in secondary schools last year. From the boy that escaped the clutches of death in a religious boarding school to the one that succumbed to injuries sustained from playing football (it is unclear if his opponents were Greek gods like Achilles and Hercules or he was the football himself due to the scarcity of authentic footballs in our markets). Please do not hold it against us, my sweet girl.

You were declared missing on February 26 until March 7 yet our Enforcers play detective blind and lame with half-hearted investigations (as usual) and a shoddy public interrogation of the suspect. There are already several contradictory reports of the Accused’s confession. From his ‘monkey story’ claim of being held hostage at gun point to another report of admitting to molesting you as published  by Sunrise News on March 13, we do not know which to believe and it would hurt me personally if he goes on to win Mr Cell in Kirikiri (why are suspected murderers participating in beauty contests? Do prison officials not give a hoot about the mental health of the victim’s family?)

I am uncertain of the motive behind your murder because there are ambiguous reports on the mutilation of your body for ritual sacrifices/organ harvesting and I am beginning to link women as the major victims of such crimes. Remember Uwaila Omozuwa that was raped, mutilated and murdered while she sought refuge in a church or Hiny Umoren that was tricked and murdered while she went for a job interview? Do not get me started on the serial murderer that was let loose in Port Harcourt with the MO of murdering women in different hotel rooms or the serial rapist in Oyo. Do you know what these cases have in common asides the bungling of the prosecution of the criminals involved? If you guess women, then you are correct.

It hurts me when the remains of victims are found and the loudest voices are those victim-blaming/shaming while using it as an instructional material for women. Like during the Christmas holidays when videos of women being brutally murdered for rituals (with the viral song~ you want to bam ba, you want to chill with the big boys) was making media rounds, some decided that it was time to caution women about their greed and unscrupulous movements (as though the victims deserved the gruesome deaths).

I consider the discovery of your corpse coinciding with the celebration of women internationally as serendipitous. I’m wondering if your demise will be the straw that breaks the camel’s back and would incite women (like the kidnap of Chibok girls) all over the world to march against ritual-murder violence in Nigeria. I am hoping this would be the last ritual-murder attack against women as the entire country should (feminists and non-feminists) fight to combat this injustice.

Seeing that the victims are usually women, it confuses me when detractors, especially women, denounce everything feminism and it irks me when they speak against women’s movement for equality claiming misandrists and transgender-rights advocates and their antics cannot share the same ideology as themselves (someone needs to explain to me like I’m a toddler why I have to defend transwomen who want to enjoy the best of both worlds). It is ridiculous that those who make these arguments about the ‘bad eggs’ in feminism usually do not renounce religion irrespective of the atrocities committed by clerics.

The theme of this year’s IWD ‘breaking the bias’ has caused me to reflect on the journey women have taken over the ages to get to this point; the desire to be heard, seen and viewed as people not properties for the pleasure of the men in their lives. Whenever I read historical fiction, I cannot imagine myself being confined to marriage, child rearing and home keeping yet this used to be our shared reality. Imagine women like Florence Nightingale, Mary Slessor, Amelia Earhart, Maya Angelou, Rosa Parks, and Sojourner Truth did not contest the status quo what would be our plight?

Egba to n fi naa iyale, o wa lori aja fun iyawo ~the cane used on the first wife can easily be made available for the new wife. The silence of women in particular, towards injustice is deafening and regardless of ideology, one thing is certain, silence on the murder of one woman today could be silence on your own murder tomorrow.

Bamise, though I am not confident that you would get justice, I hope your death becomes a rallying point for well-meaning Nigerians to speak out and push for positive change (one has to specify what kind of change since 2015).

Sun re o!

Giwa writes from the University of Lagos.