SOMETIMES, funeral orations are delivered by the very killers the world is looking for. Sometimes the killers are in the crowd comforting the widow(er) and the little ones left behind by the departed. Certain accursed souls collude with demons to kill a man and deviously join humans to mourn him, as a perceptive reader reacting to the story of Nigeria’s foremost criminologist, Femi Odekunle, once wrote in TELL magazine during the Sani Abacha years.
History is memory. It was Christmas time when a murderer’s hand lurking in the shadows, per the South African poet Oswald Mtshalli, struck down the helpless victim in JP Clark’s city scattered among seven hills. In 2001, a lawyers’ General, like a literal General before him in Lalupon, a city on the outskirts of our city, took the journey to the afterlife soaked in his own blood, but at least the body was found. And that’s great because sometimes, it isn’t just that there is a void, like Zakes Mda would have us note in his autobiographical novel of that title; there’s an actual disappearance.
Amelia Earhart, legendary aviator, melted into the Pacific Ocean in 1937: she was in the air when she fled this world, quite unlike Jimmy Hoffa, the mafia labour leader last seen at Machus Red Fox restaurant in Bloomfield, Michigan, on July 30, 1975. Just what is a mere individual when an entire flight, say the Malaysian Airlines’ Flight MH370 which held a talk with the Indian Ocean in 2014 and chose to cease from presence, can vanish? Hannibal’s brother, Hasdrubal, vanished during the Second Punic War, but the story this week is no Greek mythology with a seduced Helen supposedly abducted by Paris, and sparking a costly ten-year war. It is, like the story of a baby taken from her mentally challenged mother but never found thereafter (about which the master communist, Nosa Osaigbovo, wrote the blockbuster, Baby Oluwatoyin: Dead or alive?), except that in this case we are not in the ancient city of Akure but in Lagos and the dark world of transport unionism where occult manipulations, thuggery, violence and cash combine to create an open sore in our dastardly existence.
The Guardian did the society much favour with the story, “Woman dies searching for abducted husband”, published on Thursday this week. The details are horrific: Rashida Olusegun, a mother of three, slumped and died in Badagry after a fruitless search for her husband. The man in question, Bamidele Olusegun, a former secretary of the Ijesha, Lagos branch of the National Union of Road Transport Workers (NURTW), had vanished in the most extraordinary circumstances. The climax of the story: “She also went to the Badagry Correctional Centre, where a man who knew her and her husband whispered to her that her husband was in ‘Potoki’ Island, Badagry, a dangerous island where kidnapped people were kept. The unnamed person also informed Rashida that a ransom had been paid for her husband’s assassination by…, who felt that her husband was hindering his ambition of becoming the state chairman of the union. The informant added that because they knew the abducted Bamidele, they didn’t want to kill him as planned, but because they had accepted money for his life, they decided to keep him on Potoki Island until he starved to death. It was at that point that she collapsed and died before medical help could reach her.”
To be sure, the accused official flatly denied the allegations, and here I accuse him of nothing. He said he had not “personally seen the man they are claiming” he abducted “for the past four years,” and that he had been busy nursing a leg injury, being “an ordinary branch chairman trying to provide” for his family. He then added the clincher: “I hear he is now in Ibafo in Ogun State, where he stays in a hotel. The initial news we heard was that he was dead, but later, we heard that it was his wife who died after she went to Badagry and was told that her husband was being held at ‘Potoki’ Island.”
But where is Bamidele Olusegun, a.k.a Alapa? His loving wife who toured police posts and prisons in Lagos looking for answers now lies in her grave, a metaphor for our world of pain. Was he truly in Potoki Island, the forest of the heartless, tormented to utter senseless by his abductors, or is he comfortably nestled in a harlot’s bosom at a hotel in Ibafo, Ogun State? It is hard to flay a person you have not seen, and Citizen Olusegun may at this very moment be experiencing torture of the worst kind, abducted by people no one knows as yet, but who may very well be among his natural company.
Everywhere you turn in today’s Nigeria, criminals call the shots, visiting the most horrific brutalities on innocent citizens. Women are raped for weeks on end, then left in the forest to die, while men are butchered with sadistic pleasure, often by serpents from distant lands. As I wrote these lines on Thursday night, a message wended its way through WhatsApp: “Beware of Esa Oke, Oke-Imesi and Imesi-Ile road. Bandits are back in that area. Some people have been killed while others were abducted.” Chai! We have entered gau! As our elders say, the clothing came too late: Omoye is already in the market, stark naked.
In this clime, motor business seems to be a long conference with Lucifer. Time and again, transport chiefs have been busted with illegal arms, and change of guard events at motor parks are often nothing but deadly battles with broken bones and shattered tendons. Innocent citizens caught in the melee, like a medical student cut down in cold blood in Iwo Road, Ibadan, sometime in this Republic, often have no one to tell their story as the nation banishes the chastening of memory because of the lure of daily bread. Again I ask: Where is Citizen Bamidele Olusegun? Is he dead or alive?
Hear his elder brother, Alabi Oluwasegun: “When we started looking for our brother, his wife was at the forefront. She went to all the police stations and correctional centres in Lagos.” Gallant woman! Her noble pursuit led her to the grave, but perhaps her husband is still alive. Perhaps, he and the innocent children I wrote about in “Looking for the Abia four” (December 9, 2023) are still alive. If they are, may they be found and rescued quickly, and their abductors dispatched to hell.
