An American missionary who specialized in feeding malnourished Ugandan children and a brutal ex-police officer in Anambra State could not have less in common on the surface. One of them specialised in helping life along while the other specialists in snuffing it out prematurely. Yet both were guilty of the exact same thing.
Renee Bach, the disgraced ex missionary and James Nwafor, the now-infamous head of the horrifically brutal police SARS division in Awkuzu, Anambra State might seem to be strange bedfellows and yet a term I have coined perfectly encapsulates what they are about, and why certain things go unspotted and unpunished for years or even decades in Africa and around the world.
Wanna do crime? Go big or go home
Josef Fritzl, the infamous Austrian antichrist arrested in 2009 for keeping his daughters locked up in his basement for decades, was described by neighbours as…not much of a muchness. By all accounts, there was simply not much to say about him. He looked ordinary, acted ordinary, came across as boring, and interacted normally with his community.
Yet under the regular exterior was a secret that tore apart the foundations of his town when it was exposed. It was much the same with Renee Bach. She showed up to Bless the rains down in Aaafricaaa like your regular, bog-standard, garden variety white saviour with a ‘save the children’ type NGO. Nobody bothered to ask whether she had any medical qualifications whatsoever, after all, she was white and she had US dollars to disburse.
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1 child died under her care. Then 2, 3, 10, 25, 47, 73. 105. Finally, after years of killing Ugandan children unchallenged, Bach was eventually arrested in 2019. She never got to answer for her crimes in Uganda, being the holder of a US passport which entitled her to the privilege of murdering African children and being able to return unharmed to America. If she had killed just 1 or 2 kids, maybe the outcome would have been different.
Maybe the US embassy in Kampala would have been less keen to intervene on behalf of a child killer whose sole victim’s story was told well and told repeatedly. As is all too often the case, however, 1 death is a tragedy, but 1,000 deaths are a statistic. This is an example of what call Nwafor’s Law, named for CSP James Nwafor who is the most visible living example of this paradox.
Nwafor’s Law in Awkuzu
James Nwafor in his now-famous scowling photograph does not look like anything other than your regular old Nigerian ‘olokpa’. He does not have horns growing out of his head and on cursory examination, all his body parts follow the same arrangement of a normal human being. For many years, he and his family led a respectable middle-class existence in Awka, 30km away from where he killed, tortured and maimed people every day.
His wife, Anthonia looks like the quintessential pious Nigerian middle-aged wife and mom, complete with the obligatory church position and the shop in Awka. His son and daughter are unspectacular in their own right too. There is nothing on the surface to indicate that beneath this veneer of banal normalcy lies one of the worst records of extreme sadism, horrific brutality and sheer impunity to ever emerge from the world of supposed law enforcement.
CSP Nwafor as we now know, was responsible for hundreds if not thousands of deaths during his reign at the helm of the infamous Awkuzu SARS unit. Among the many horror stories, we are now familiar with over the past week is the story of Nwafor making a man wade through the floating bodies of his victims on the Ezu river in search of his son’s corpse, and a young man whom Nwafor shot to death inside his office in his lawyer’s presence.
Nwafor is the closest thing Nigeria has had to the pure evil of the Josef Mengele variety since Colonel Frank Omenka and his reign of terror at General Sani Abacha’s DMI in the 1990s. Yet without the ongoing #EndSARS furore, he would have continued living his quiet, cushy, comfortable life as a political appointee of Anambra State Governor Willie Obiano. The several hundred corpses credited to his direct and indirect actions at the Auschwitz-style police station in Awkuzu do not reflect on his face or those of his family.
Like with Renee Bach and Josef Fritzl, the moral of Nwafor’s story can be reduced to the following maxim: If you’re going to commit a crime, do it big. The world harshly punishes people who kill a single human or commit a single rape but shrinks away in disbelief at the sight of someone who does these crimes in multiples.
This shall henceforth be known as ‘Nwafor’s Law.’
