Efeturi Abayomi is the founder of Rehoboth Ministry, an NGO dedicated to the less privileged widows in the society. Several years before her husband passed on, she had developed an unflinching passion for widows, touching and impacting their lives in different ways. Recently, we met her at an event organized to celebrate International Widows Day in Lagos where she was the Chief Guest speaker.

In the last two weeks, it has been a harvest of killings in some Nigerian higher institutions; first in the University of Maiduguri on September 29, followed by Federal Polytechnic, Mubi and lastly University of Port Harcourt. All the scenarios surrounding the killings are gruesomely disturbing.

As ugly a human undertaking as any kind of war is, none is as gruesome as a fratricidal conflict and that describes every civil war. Our three year-long experience could not have been devoid of some shameful acts on both sides, soured as it was by ethnic prejudices. But the mature and cultured mind takes it all in and allows the finest touch of the human spirit to mellow it down. That is the quality of the mentality that one would expect in an accomplished writer like Chinua Achebe.

The opening scene is four naked bodies, beaten and bloodied lying in the mud almost lifeless. A man bends down to raise a young man’s head and places a tyre over it; then came the words: “die, die…” Then a big plank is raised and brought down repeatedly on the head of one of the boys still trying to move on the floor, from the corner a big slab of concrete is hurled and it hits the face of another; in another corner lies another young man whose lips are swollen and he has a dazed look on his face…

Pat Utomi and I go a long way. Back to the middle eighties when I was the Vanguard Editor and he was one of our trusted resource persons. We relied on him for a lot of things, especially when it had to do with business and politics. If you needed an article like yesterday, (the life of an Editor) Pat was your man. And he usually delivered.