So just over a week ago, there was a riot in my school, a peaceful protest turned violent when the university authorities refused to grant audience to the protesting students. The Nigerian Police was called in and by the end of the day, a student, Kingsley Udoette (Umoette, if you listen to some folks) had been shot dead presumably by the Nigerian Police Force. Some students, annoyed over the killing, went around torching buildings in school and causing all manner of mayhem.
Today, I saw this story ’44 Nigerian university students face murder charge’ and here is what I garnered:
1. The police have 44 students in their custody. You guys know how the Nigerian Police gets suspects and confessions of guilt, right?
2. The students were charged with arson and murder. Arson, like we all know, is the crime of deliberately setting fire to public buildings. Murder is the unlawful, premeditated killing of a human being by another.
3. The students have been refused bail by the court and have been remanded in police custody.
Now, the questions bugging me are these: Was this an intra-student conflict? Did the students murder Kingsley? If they did not, then why has the police not charged the errant policeman that shot Kingsley with murder? Why are the students being punished for the action of the Nigerian Police Force by the Nigerian Police Force?
Personally, I can understand the arson charge. But murder, I just can’t wrap my head round it. What the police have done is akin to charging a murdered corpse with suicide. I’m asking myself how the we got here? I don’t understand, I can’t understand. This is the same country where a police officer shot, killed and buried an innocent student in Benin the other day and a court declared that James Ibori was innocent.
I know that in our eagerness for the full resumption of normal academic activities, a lot of us don’t really mind the actions or inactions of the university authorities and the police so long as we ‘graduate on time’, but let’s pause for a moment and think: How long will it take before this kind of brutality by the police gets to us?
Lets join our voices together and call for the scrapping of the spurious murder charge against those students, many of whom had nothing to do with the ensuing carnage and just happened to find themselves at the wrong place at the wrong time. It is the Nigerian Police that has a murder charge to answer, not the students. The man who ignores injustice meted out to fellow humans is just feeding a monster, praying that it never thinks about eating him, or that it eats him last.
Israel, David E
400L, Electrical/Electronics Engineering
University of Uyo (UniUyo), Akwa Ibom State
