Wars: Pains hitting home

War both connotes and denotes danger and death, affliction and threat. It is a period when nothing else matters than just to be alive, to run and run.

War is defined as an organized, armed conflict between nations, states, or large groups characterized by extreme violence, destruction, and social disruption. By this, war is gun, war is bloodshed, war is mass killing, war is destruction of people you know or may not know, people who may not have offended you, so long as you have a motive of either conquest or territorial occupation.

War is the same in the poor communities as in advance societies with highrise buildings. Yet, wars sometimes carry a sense of chivalry and adventure. No matter what, war is death, certain death.

War sometimes sound adventurous if it is hitting and heating faraway, but when war is next door, work stops, careers perish, just to be alive.

Generation that witnessed war vow never ever, but when a new generation arrives, every provocation becomes something to fight against; every injustice deserves a fightback.

So, the war in Iran is bringing pains home in many ways; misery, inflation adding to existing inflation, and people dying in distant lands. To you here, it is distant, but to people in the Middle East, anywhere there, it is hitting home.

But here in Nigeria, we have our own wars. Herdsmen, Boko haram, bandits, all have levied war on innocent farmers, Christians, and others. They began by dyeing with their victims through suicide bombing in Bornu now to bandits killing people without election to die along.

We hear some are killing to protect mining centres in the north. Too worrisome are the killings in Plateau, Benue, now heading to Kwara and Kogi. We hear they are herdsmen trying to occupy the Middle Belt, but is it possible to kill everyone to take over?

In the south east and south-south, it was militancy, now organ harvesting and rampant kidnapping. Some kill to advance a freedom agenda, others kill as herdsmen or pseudo herdsmen. When you apprehend them and unmask them, you see a full-blooded southerner claiming to be herdsman. Fraud has entered the game.

This has created two generations in the SE; those who saw war but fear it forever, and those who did not see war but want it.

Whatever, tales of uncles being killed in the war, families being wiped off, etc, are getting into homes. The pains are deep.