By Rotimi Fasan
FOR the people of Gbongan in Ayedaade Local Government Area of Osun State, Tuesday, May 3, was indeed a sad day, a day two families from the small town would always want to forget.

This was the day the town had the unenviable task of burying two young members of the community who were mowed down in the prime of life in the line of duty.

For Ebenezer Ayotunde Gbenjo and Kehinde Jelil Adeniji death came early and rather too brutally. Since both men, members of the National Youth Service Corp were murdered on April 16 in Giade Local Government Area of Borno State while serving as members of INEC team of adhoc staff, the media has been awash with reports of their gruesome murder.

They were not the only victims of the delinquent activities of misdirected youths from parts of the North. No less than 20 serving members of the NYSC scheme died while working with INEC during the course of the series of national elections that ended only some days back. But for too long after the murder of the ‘corpers’ either through bombing or, like victims of Taliban-like justice, carelessly beheaded, they were no more than mere statistical figures on the nation’s electoral casualty list.

On this dark Tuesday, however, the heart-wrenching fact of their murder came home to me. For while travelling from Osogbo to Ibadan via Ikire, the long convoy of vehicles from the Osun State government drove past me in Ode-Omu in the heedlessly fast manner government vehicles are driven in Nigeria, apparently, on their way to Gbongan.

Many of these vehicles   had posters bearing the image of Kehinde Jelil Adeniji. For the first time since the unfortunate incident that saw some people in the North turning not just on others from other parts of the country but people employed in the service of the State, the ugliness of serving the Nigerian State was brought home in all its details.

The death of the corpers and many others during and after the 2011 elections was at once needless and unwarranted. So far nobody has been made to account for the criminal murders of people in parts of the North in what were supposed to be spontaneous acts of protests which now seem like well orchestrated acts of macabre murders.

While nobody has yet been brought to justice, some elite members of the establishment, not the least of them, Isa Yuguda, Governor of the State in which the two Nigerians from Osun State had been posted to serve their fatherland-the likes of Yuguda have had their utterances focussed upon.

In the case of Yuguda, he had spoken in a way that suggested that the corpers’ fate was inevitable, while at the same time giving the impression that they suffered just like any other victims of the rioting that followed the election in Borno State. Yuguda was irresponsible enough to compare the death of the corpers to a slap-on-the-wrist experience of his son who he said was ‘almost lynched’ by the mob that had gone on rampage.

Yuguda’s own house, one of many I must assume, the Governor took care to mention, had been torched in the mayhem that engulfed the State. For full measure the Governor informed Nigerians that he had also suffered while serving in Ibadan, Oyo State, in the late 1970s. With this last bit of information, the Governor seemed to be suggesting the acts of criminal murder was in the nature of retaliation from the North for the West’s treatment of a Northerner several decades before.

Perhaps,  Yuguda had no wish to come across as insensitive as he did but his comments seemed of the same nature as what has been attributed to Muhammadu Buhari, the CPP presidential candidate, during the elections whose loss appeared to have triggered the entire rioting in the North. Buhari had also spoken in a manner that suggested that the so-called rioters had a right to express themselves in the violently disagreeable manner they had gone about it.

In other words, Buhari had spoken like someone who didn’t think there was anything amiss with Nigerians from one part of the country turning on their compatriots, murdering them and destroying their properties all because they had to show their anger at the loss of Buhari at the polls.

The irony of it all is that those who were turned into objects of aggression like this suffered in the very states in which Buhari had won. Which would seem to suggest that this same people that Buhari’s irresponsible supporters turned upon were the very ones who probably had voted for the CPP presidential candidate. Buhari imagined his own little loss of a presidential election he argued had been rigged in certain parts of the country justifies the dispatching of Nigerians from other parts of the country to eternity.

This kind of logic is dangerous and is unfortunate considering the source. People in positions of high authority or who aspire to lead in some national office have no business assuming the toga of ethnic champions. But Buhari saw nothing wrong in this.

Yet one must say neither Buhari nor Yuguda, to say nothing of the criminal elements that perpetrated the series of murders in the North- none of them deserve blame but the Nigerian state whose lukewarm and criminal negligence allows for the kind of impunity that gives some the impression that they could kill and destroy without consequences.

Many victims of similar acts of impunity have only had to bear their loss in silence while the murderers are left to go free. The loss of the two corpers from Gbongan is now the loss of their families. Those families are left with scars of such worthless death. After all the homilies about people serving their nation what is left is the pain that some people have to bear in silence.

The families of Kehinde and Ebenezer after all their exactions, educating their children in a country where tertiary education has become a luxury are now left with the pain and empty consolation that their children died serving a country that didn’t deem it fit to pick the bill of their education but has returned them in coffins. Their loss is now theirs alone to bear even though their children supposedly died in the service of the State.

Nigeria has a way of killing her youth, destroying the very future it claims to protect. Perpetrators of criminal murders and their sponsors whose careless utterances somewhat seek justification for acts of criminality don’t deserve to be in positions of authority. As for the NYSC scheme that affords young Nigerians no protection while exposing them to every possible danger, something serious needs to be done about it by way of reformation.