By Obi Nwakanma

And so, they killed Chudi. What a bloody waste. Dr. Chudi Nwike was my friend. I did not always keep in touch, but I knew, somehow that he was out there; in the great grip of things, bold and idealistic; dreaming of great and worthy political battles. I was introduced to him when he became the Deputy governor of Anambra state, and I found him, among many things, voluble, thoughtful, idealistic, and certainly a man with some political ideas.

He was literate and well-read; a medical doctor who, like his great inspiration, Che Guevara, thought that true public service was equally a call to healing. He counted himself on the left of the political spectrum; he was certainly one of those, who if you came into Enugu, was likely to make your visit worth it, in terms generally of the fact that he did not partake in the frivolity of mere jollity, but though not disdaining jollity, added a brilliant and serious take to things.

Sadly, I’d not seen Chudi since 2009, and perhaps spoke to him only once in the last five years, but as I said, he’d stayed somewhere in my horizon and in the unconscious. I’d not started counting him among the dead or dying yet; I had a clear sense that he had his years – great political years still ahead of him.

Mr Nwike

He had made political choices that tended more towards bridge-building; he had joined the AD; he was I have since learned, National Vice-President of the ACN, and I had no doubt that Dr. Chudi Nwike was a political force in the making; a truly great leader among the new generation of the Igbo; until his kidnap and the report of his death in the hands of his abductors this past week, Dr. Chudi Nwike was among those whom one could count as embodying the true example of future Igbo political renaissance and sterling public leadership. His political conscience was clear, and his heart and mind were in the right places.

The news of his murder shook me to the bones, as it should shake any Igbo and Nigerian, or any human with any sense of worth. I am personally outraged that we have, as a society, slipped to this miasma; our sensibility deadened by the ubiquitous devaluation of the most sacred meaning of life. But of course, it is impotent rage. My rage as a citizen counts not for much in Nigeria, because government stopped functioning. Governments that do not function do not listen to citizens’ concerns.

Citizens’ concerns do not count for anything when the state itself with which a contract of consent is presumably registered becomes fragmented, incoherent and transitional. The current state of violence in Nigeria marks Nigeria as incoherent, fragmented and frightening. My real concern is that Nigeria has moved too far into a culture of violence never before seen; not even under the military; but worse still, that the state in its current incoherence is unable to offer her citizens any assurance of protection and security.

If the Nigerian state can no longer protect us, what is its purpose? What is the reason for its existence? Dr. Nwike’s murder further highlights a most troubling stage of the violence and insecurity that now ravages Nigeria. Here was a man – a public figure; a medical doctor; a national Vice-President of a political party and in fact, former Deputy governor of a state – abducted like some wet chicken, taken across state borders, and weeks later found dead with two other bodies dumped carelessly on the road between Agbor and Asaba.

A former deputy governor of a state no less! Not that it makes even a difference, were the now late Dr. Nwike to be another regular Nigerian, but the real problem here is that we have moved further and further out of the range of reason into pointless anomy. Death is now too easy; the paid Kidnapper and hired Assassin is now, by all indication, the fastest growing industry in Nigeria with limitless job opportunities.

As I write this, another great friend of mine – a fine gentleman by the name, Kehinde Bamigbetan, county chairman of the Ejigbo Local Council Authority, was reportedly kidnapped in Lagos, last week. He is yet to be found. We ought to consider that in the rise of this level of violence, everyone increasingly is fair game – from the president to the street cleaner.

Those who today feel protected behind the thick walls of official state protection as governors or as even as president or judges or legislators, may have to understand that time will come when they too will become exposed and vulnerable, and nothing says may not be found dead lying by the ditch on a lonely road, just like Dr. Chudi Nwike. It is easy to feel complacent when one is within these cocoons. Quite frankly, the police response to this killing is dismaying. At the discovery of the body, the Delta State police spokesperson is reported to have said, “we cannot confirm that the body is he…we don’t know him!”

It is primitive and lackadaisical police work, and speaks once more to the sorry state of police services in Nigeria which makes it now possible for Nigeria to be increasingly overwhelmed by this surge of killings and with no justice for the victims. Heck! Even a serving State Police Commissioner was waylaid and shot square on the guts in Enugu, and to date, the police apparatus, has not interdicted his killers. Dr. Chudi Nwike is now just another victim.

The way we are going, and by all indexes, Nigeria has actively slipped into a Somali-type catalepsis. The president is busy negotiating amnesty for the Boko Haram ghosts in the north, where social order has virtually collapsed, while in the South, even the high gates built by the wealthy to hide their faces from the poor, seem now incapable of protecting them from kidnappers and hired assassins.

The South too is at war with itself. It is currently a low intensity war. But it is also a war of values. In a region with a young, highly educated but unemployed and even unemployable population, we no longer have a ticking bomb. The bomb has gone off. But I write today about Chudi Nwike: his party, the ACN of which he was national Vice-President has made only but tepid noises about this killing; the Anambra state government of which he served as Deputy governor has shown interests no keener in unraveling his killers as though Dr. Nwike were no more than another number in its mortality statistics; just tepid sympathies offered to his family.

Who killed Chudi Nwike? Is this political assassination? Is this a kidnap and ransom situation gone awry? Is this the way a good man should go? The answer, my friends, is blowing in the wind.