Harira Jubril and Her Four Daughters: A Requiem
- Today makes it exactly one year, Harira Jubril, a pregnant lady, and her 4 daughters were callously shot dead by yet-to-be-identified gunmen inside Awka, Anambra State as they walked along the road. It was a Sunday, a day traditionally reserved for rest.
- Their horrendous and utterly reprehensible killing represents, yet again, another watershed moment in the slide into anarchy of virtually every part of Nigeria.
- One year later, with no arrests, no commemorative events in honour and in assuagement thereof, and a reported donation of #500,000 in the immediate aftermath from the governor of Anambra State to Jubril, the distraught husband and father, we all have moved on as if these happenings were natural and normal.
- We condemn this reprehensible madness of violence ongoing in parts of the South-East. In the same vein, we also condemn the killing of Deborah Samuel Yakubu, a second-year Christian college student, who was murdered by a mob of Muslim students in Sokoto, Nigeria, a year ago on 12th May 2022, after unilateral accusations of blasphemy, without the privilege of court trial even within the parameters set by the religious faith of her accusers.
- Again, Nigerians have moved on. Indeed, it was in the news last week that the courts in Sokoto have freed Deborah’s suspected killers for want of diligent prosecution by the police!!! Why would the police not prosecute diligently? We await confirmation of this further evidence of our collective loss of humanity but we won’t be holding our breath.
- We also condemn the ongoing genocide in Mangu/Bokkos LGA of Plateau State and other parts of Nigeria without adequate answers by the Nigerian state.
- Responsible and visionary leadership, which has been missing in the last eight years, must retool our security agencies with both investigative and preventive capacity.
- Policing must devolve down to the grassroots in a new federating compact so that police work stops looking to the locals like an occupation force; so that policing may have the buy-in of the locals, for it is almost impossible for locals in all parts of Nigeria not to know who the miscreants among them are.
- As British poet, John Donne said in his poem, “For whom the bell tolls (No man is an island),”
“Each man’s death diminishes me,
For I am involved in mankind.
Therefore, send not to know
For whom the bell tolls,
It tolls for thee.”
Citizen Ikeazor Akaraiwe, SAN
22, May 2023