When will Nigerian lives matter?

I remember the first time I saw my father scared. He had come to pick me up from my primary school in Maryland, Lagos and we were on our way home. Just outside Ikeja military cantonment, we had a small collision with another car. I can’t remember who was at fault, I was maybe 10 at the time. But my dad and the owner of the other car started going at it, each blaming the other for the accident. At a point, the other man said he was going to bring his soldier friends from the cantonment, and they would straighten my dad out.

Immediately my dad saw the man indeed heading into the cantonment, he sped off. As we drove through GRA, he kept looking in his rear-view mirror, clearly worrying the man might have found his soldier friends and come chasing after us. This was the Babangida-era. I will never forget the fear I saw on my father’s face that day, and how scared that made me feel. It does something to a boy, the first time he sees his father afraid.

My dad was a middle-class architect, so hardly the most vulnerable citizen in society. But he had no “connections” in the military, so the prospect of a confrontation with Nigerian soldiers clearly frightened him. Now imagine the fear a poor Nigerian must feel when dealing with Nigerian policemen or soldiers. Knowing fully well that once you’re not a VIP in Nigeria, you can be manhandled, mistreated and even killed without much fear of consequence. Because only VIP lives matter in Nigeria. The rest of the country is expendable. A black man is murdered by a white policeman in America and the whole country explodes in protests. I know this is because this was hardly the first such incident.

Read also: Suicidality in Nigeria! Why this matters

But violence against the Nigerian body, including by the state, has become so normalised it is difficult to imagine the same kind of widespread reaction here. Shiites, IPOB members, the list is long, even in recent “democratic” years. Death and violence have no shock value in Nigeria. I sometimes wonder why. Where does this come from? The military-era, many will say. Maybe. That certainly didn’t help. But I think it’s something deeper. Something that goes beyond the experience of military rule. I think the very principle of the sanctity of every human life is one that has yet to capture the Nigerian mind at all levels of society.

I make no claim to be the one who truly cares while others don’t. In fact, growing up in Nigeria, I didn’t consider every human life sacred myself. I believed the world was divided into important people and unimportant people. I wasn’t born thinking that way, I soaked it in from my environment

We see the protests triggered by the murder of George Floyd in America and we remember all the incidents of police brutality towards black people we heard about or witnessed before. But if we are to be real with ourselves, we also know that as a rule, 21^st century America and other Western societies treat far more seriously the idea every human life is sacred than is the case in Nigeria. That’s why when criminals in America feel cornered, they often try to take a hostage. Because they know American police officers will go out of their way to avoid that hostage getting harmed or killed. The whole police playbook is based on the premise they must avoid the loss of innocent life at all costs. So, having a hostage gives the criminal immediate leverage in the situation. Is there anyone who seriously thinks taking a hostage would prevent Nigerian police or soldiers from shooting at you if they wanted to?

Human life is not yet truly considered sacred in Nigeria. Of course, everybody pays lip-service to the idea it is, but lip-service and deeply-held convictions are two very different things. I think the more popularly-held belief in Nigeria is that some lives matter and some lives don’t. You see it when a VIP dies and regular folk seem genuinely moved whereas that same VIP couldn’t give two hoots if that regular person lived or died.

I make no claim to be the one who truly cares while others don’t. In fact, growing up in Nigeria, I didn’t consider every human life sacred myself. I believed the world was divided into important people and unimportant people. I wasn’t born thinking that way, I soaked it in from my environment. I get the pressures people face in Nigeria. To survive. To pay their kid’s school fees. Their mother’s hospital bills. It can all be quite overwhelming. Where in all these everyday worries are you going to find the time or energy to think of the tragedies of others? Of the fact others around you are constantly being bullied, beaten or killed.

But I also know there is an inescapable truth in the words of Martin Luther King when he said, “Our world hinges on moral foundations.” This is not an abstract intellectual assertion or the to-be-expected-but-not-taken-that-seriously words of a pastor. Human societies are built on ideas of what is just and what is not, what is acceptable and what is not. It is only when a preponderance of people in a society determine that a thing should be this way, and not that way, that it can be so. Nigerian lives will only matter when a preponderance of Nigerians determine that it must be so. Until then, a Nigerian life will continue to mean little if society does not consider you to mean much.