Killing of students: Somebody at the top must die

The Guardian newspaper quoted a civil society organization saying somebody at the top must be punished.  But I believe somebody at the top must die!  After all, the common punishment for our top uniform officers is redeployment.  However, in this case, lives were lost.  The people responsible for the deaths must also die.  Someone may […]

The Guardian newspaper quoted a civil society organization saying somebody at the top must be punished.  But I believe somebody at the top must die!  After all, the common punishment for our top uniform officers is redeployment.  However, in this case, lives were lost.  The people responsible for the deaths must also die.  Someone may say this is extreme, but it’s not.  In our laws, the punishment for murder is death – if anything, they should be killed twice because they killed our students!
This is not the first time our security agents are killing students, and if nothing is done now, it wouldn’t be the last. It happened at University of Ibadan in 1973 when Adepoju was killed, 10 students were also gunned down in Ahmadu Bello University (ABU) in 1986.  More students were killed in Yaba Tech in 1991 and Tai Solarin University in 2009.  All these killings occurred because our university managers believe the only people who can stop students’ protests are soldiers and the police.  But our police and soldiers are lazy.  Instead of arresting people who cause public disorder, they take the easy way out by killing them.  Our security agents should take lessons from how the police handled the London riots of August 2011 – the worst the city had seen in decades.
The rioters, mostly young men, looted shops, broke into banks, set fire to buildings and destroyed vehicles.  Further, they tackled the police and threw bottles and missiles at them.   It was three nights of hell and disorder.  Yet the police didn’t kill the protesters, instead they arrested them; on August 8, they arrested more than 100 in one night.  Do not forget that the London rioters also committed murder and injured many; yet the police didn’t fitfully shoot at them.  But all (more than 400) were arrested and sufficiently punished by the courts.   So those people claiming that the soldiers only responded to violent acts by the students are only insulting us.
 The army further insults us by denying the killings.  A bewildered student of the university, Ijezie Richard, wrote on his Facebook wall:  “I am really baffled that the same soldiers that shot us are denying it. To some extent, the men in black (policemen) showed understanding as they even pleaded with us to clear the road. But when the soldiers came, they started shooting sporadically. Today, you killed someone else’s child, tomorrow will certainly be yours.”
The universities think the services they offer are favours to the students. That’s not true!  It’s your duty.  The lecturers should know that they’re paid for their instructions and the university managers should know that these students sometimes have to pay through their noses to get a degree.  I know education is cheap in Nigeria but that’s not enough reason to treat students like scum.  Besides, there are countries which charge far cheaper tuition fees than our universities – India is a case in point.  Even foreign students there pay cheaper fees than Nigerian students pay in their own universities.  Therefore, students must not be treated like enemies but like customers.  And you must cozy up to your customer because he is king.
However, the more shocking fact is how insignificant our leaders consider this barbarism.  When a psychopath opened fire on school pupils, Obama made it a point to comment and considered ways of forestalling reoccurrence.  But those who killed our students are sane (at least that’s what they want us to believe) people and our president has said nothing.  It’s the federal agents who killed the students, so the president must name and punish the actors according to the degree of their culpability.  Those that need to die must be so sentenced.  There is no wriggling out of this.  You can’t justify the killings by labeling the students Boko Haram or armed robbers as the security agents usually do.  These were our STUDENTS – unarmed innocent students who were protesting lack of water and electricity, their rights! 
We’ve also not heard anything from the so-called people’s governor of Nassarawa State who is the custodian of the institution.   Students were killed in your institution what are you going to do?  The state legislators have also not spoken – this is one of the issues they were elected for.  While the Federal Government fishes out the person(s) responsible for the deployment of the soldiers within the army, they must tell us the moron(s) who invited the military from within the institution.
It’s heart-warming that the lower chamber of the National Assembly has started investigation concerning the killings.  But it had to take a legislator, Kingsley Chinda, from Rivers State not Nassarawa to raise the issue. 
The party in power in the state, CPC, must also condemn the killings.  Lecturers as a body too should rise up and be joint-owners of this fight and seek explanation from and punishment against the culprits.
Finally, Nassarawa State and the Federal Government must pay compensation to the families of the dead and the injured.  If they failed to do so, our lawyers should make it their duty to help the families sue the army, Federal Government, Nassarawa State and the university.