The headlines are troubling. The acts are disturbing. Nothing stays the same any longer. The emblems are inked in crimson red, in human blood. Death stalks the streets with swashbuckling swagger. A nation draped in red, bathed in blood. Nigeria is at war with herself. There is fury in the land. Religion and ethnicity, unfortunately, fuel the fury. They breed hate among the people. And no class is immune. The rich, the not-so-rich and the despoiled all feast from the broth of this consuming opium called religion.

Religion has never built a nation. It has not even made any nation a bastion of morals. Religion cannot enforce holiness and never will. It has not made the beastly man to become the meek lamb. It has only provided humanity a perfect veil to cover her hypocrisy. In some cases, a perfect platform to spill blood, human blood; to slaughter fellow man like you do to a stubborn game.

And ethnicity? It sires its own variant of wild children. It is the reason for the division of the kingdom. Hausa versus Yoruba, Igbo versus Hausa, Ijaw against Urhobo, Ibibio versus Annang. Many voices, one nation. One day, many troubles. There is indeed trouble in the land. The chief of the troubles, however, is the itinerant scraggy figure called the herdsman. In the beginning it was not so. In those days, the herdsman was a friendly nomad who happily co-habited with one and all. He was everywhere with his cattle and everyone welcomed him.

In those days, the herdsman shared water and food with his host community. But that era is gone. The herdsman has become a goon; a marauding gorilla armed with AK-47, a deadly mortal contraption that spills blood. In those days, we knew the herdsman as a stick-bearing mallam with a gourd of water hanging from his shoulder. Today, he has upgraded, fatally. He has replaced his stick with a gun.  And with that he has become more brazen, primitively wild, even wilder than his cattle. The herdsman has become a hoodlum. No more does he ask for water or bread from his hosts.

Armed with a gun, he seizes the stage, confiscates both the water and the bread and then kills the owners. The once benign and friendly cow-herder has become a bloody and benighted gangster.  All over Nigeria, anywhere he visits he leaves his imprints of death and destruction. He signs his signature with blood, human blood. What has taken hold of him; what has turned our friend and brother of yesterday to a destroying enemy of today. I shudder to believe that the same killing machine called the herdsman was the same man who yesterday fetched water free of charge from my father’s well in my rustic and pristine Delta State community. Then, he had no gun. He was friendly; we were kind to him; shared jokes with him and even played with his herd of cattle. There was no ill-will; there was no hate, just genuine benignity. He drank from our cup of benevolence and ate from our plate of goodwill. Yet, the same herdsmen who frolicked in our community many years back returned in 2016, this time armed with deadly guns, and killed my king, my Obi, my beloved monarch.

But the herdsman is a lucky man; a privileged breed of homo sapiens. He is helped by the ambivalence of a government that has chosen to look away from his atrocities. The herdsman is emboldened, indeed enabled by the state apparatchik. Just consider this: the herdsman has killed in Plateau, Nasarawa, Ekiti, Abia, Delta, Anambra. He has killed everywhere including on the highways. He has destroyed farms, razed communities and exterminated families. But he is never arrested let alone prosecuted. He is a free man, a freeborn who delights in killing and maiming the serfs of Nigeria.

For all his devious acts and vicious orgy of bloodletting, he gets protection from state actors. The authorities warn us to stop rustling (stealing) his cattle. The theory is that any community where his cattle are stolen gets a baptism of bullets and pellets. So, for the life of a cow, he takes the life of human beings, even the possessions of an entire community. Such is the privilege of this herdsman.

Juxtapose that with the fate of the pro-Biafra protesters. The Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB) marched through the streets of Port Harcourt recently in solidarity with Donald John Trump, the intrepid 45^th President of the United States. It was a protest Trump didn’t know about, didn’t solicit for and may never be bothered about it even if he knew. But they have a right under Nigerian law to assemble and protest for as long as it is a peaceful procession. Unlike the gun-bearing herdsmen, the protesters were not armed yet they were shot at (some reports said a couple of death was recorded). They were arrested and within 24 hours they were arraigned. I commend such efficiency but I don’t understand its whys and wherefores.

But the same efficiency peters out when it concerns the killer goon called the herdsman. He has engaged the police in shootouts, he has killed monarchs, he has exterminated families and reduced communities to graveyards yet he walks free; unhinged and unperturbed.  He is the lord of our time; imperial and impetuous. He is the alternate government. We have become, as it were, his captives.

The herdsman is indeed the feudal lord of modern Nigeria. He can do no wrong. His wrong is right. He is the only one to exercise right of ownership of the land. He can take our land, take our farms. It’s his right. And we cannot complain; we must not protest his banal acquisition of our collective and individual heritage. A pastor had the guts to complain about the blood-chilling scourge of the herdsman. He urged his members to defend themselves, to match force with force (I do not support that) and for that we sent security operatives after him; to arrest him and possibly prosecute him but we maintained an ignoble silence on the reason for the outburst of the pastor. The pastor was only responding to a stimulus. The author of such stimulus is the herdsman but we cannot arrest him, neither tame his fatal indulgence. It’s different laws for different people in the same country. I don’t understand it.

Such uneven-handedness is the reason for the pockets of agitations and restiveness across the nation. People are no longer comfortable inside the Union. They want to go, everyman to his own region or people of the same ideological leaning. Atiku Abubakar, Alex Ekwueme and many Nigerians of renown have called for restructuring of the Union because things are no longer at ease under one roof. Nigeria cannot continue to totter and dither.  We must come together and agree to stay together peacefully with a sense of equity and fairness or we agree to stay apart. It is either of the two choices. Anything outside this is pretence, a dissimulation that all is well when all is not in reality well.

There are still many things I don’t understand; like giving the armed and brutal herdsmen a free rein while gagging, killing and incarcerating unarmed crowd of peaceful protesters in the same country; like attempting to arrest a pastor who voiced his anger against the mindless and savagely killing of his people but pretending not to notice the savagery of the killers. The facts are there to prove the brutality visited on the people by these herdsmen except if we have “alternative facts” to disprove this. But I still don’t understand this loud silence ringing through the blood fields created by the herdsmen. Why are we silent? Why is nobody talking? Somebody should explain this to me because I still don’t understand it. It’s just troubling.

First published in Sun, Sunday, January 29, 2017