Tribute to a martyr

The target of the latest blast was a public viewing centre where people had gathered watching the final of the UEFA cup between Real Madrid and Atletico Madrid in Lisbon. It was a mammoth crowd and it was a miracle that only three people died. It was indeed a miracle and the credit for it […]

The target of the latest blast was a public viewing centre where people had gathered watching the final of the UEFA cup between Real Madrid and Atletico Madrid in Lisbon. It was a mammoth crowd and it was a miracle that only three people died. It was indeed a miracle and the credit for it must go to Alhaji Bello Ahmed Ali, the man who died trying to prevent the bomber from reaching the crowd.
Alhaji Bello, a hardworking family man, was born in Jos in 1952. His father, Alhaji Ahmadu Ali, a manager with BEWAC Automobile, originally came from Yola; and when he retired from BEWAC, he decided to settle down and make Jos his home. Heir to a not inconsiderable fortune in landed property and family real estate holdings, Bello led a comfortable and sheltered life. He attended St. Fatima Primary School in Jos and went on to learn the mechanic trade at the Land rover Garage situated behind his house-the very house he inherited from his father and in which he lived until his death in the blast ten days ago.
According to M. Sadiq Musallah, an eyewitness at the scene on that fateful day, a man drove a brand new Odyssey van into the Land Rover Garage around 3:00pm, complaining about his brakes. The brakes were checked but nothing was found the matter with them, and he then asked that they be adjusted as they were squeaking as he drove. When they were fixed, he drove out to test drive.
Meanwhile, Bello had all along kept observing the man and his strange movements and was relieved to see him drive his car out of the garage after the brakes were fixed. The man, whom eyewitness said looked twenty-something and had Kanuri or Chadian features, was all anxious and strung up. He didn’t return until around 5:30 pm and parked the van about 60-70 yards facing the wall that separated the garage from the viewing hall; and he remained there fidgeting and polishing the car. He was there up to Maghrib, which Sadiq said he prayed with them; and he was still there by the time of Isha prayers.
It was at that time that Alhaji Bala, Awwal Yusi [You see] and Sadiq Musallah went and accosted him. Bello asked him to leave but the man said he had permission to stay the night; but when he was asked who gave him the permission he couldn’t say. By now Bello had sent for the police as they battled to get the man out of the place.
Initially, Bello suspected the man to be a car thief; but it was when he returned after the test drive that he parked the car in a vantage point from which he could accelerate it and ram against the wall and plough into the unsuspecting crowd. When he started the car to go, we surrounded him blocking his path. Realizing that the game was up, either he or the people in the second car, an unnumbered Hilux pickup, which eyewitnesses said was waiting to pick him up, detonated the bomb far away from the 750 people packed into the viewing hall. It was said to have sped off after the explosion.
The bomber was instantly killed, but he took with him Bello, who was holding on tightly to him, and Awwal Yusi with him and several others around sustained serious injuries. Sadiq escaped by whiskers. As Bello and Awwal struggled to have the man leave, Sadiq had gone into the house to pick something. He had just got into his room, a mere 500 meters from the scene, when the ceiling caved in and everything shook with a deafening explosion. When the dust settled Bello and Awwal were gone—dismembered. It was Sadiq, Abubakar and others who collected their body parts strewn all over the place. To us, he died but to himself, he has only shed a weight.
For those who believe in the hereafter, there is no higher glory for departure, and no higher purpose to life on earth; and for those who don’t, there may appear no greater stupidity for a way to go; and no more absurd inanity in life. But even for the latter, there isn’t much glory in tracing genealogical roots to paramecium or the amoeba, just as there has never been any in regarding death and dust as end to life.
The two are a world apart—separated by the difference between the one’s belief in Kun, the great Creative Principle with which God consecrates and blesses inorganic matter with life and force—and purpose, and the other’s faith in the uncreative purposelessness of an anti-creationist cellular meiosis. And the martyr makes it plain that out of commitment to a higher purpose, out of love that is of a higher order than infatuation with the self, and out of concern that is more fundamental than the call of carnal appetites, man is ready to give away his most precious possession. And even for atheists, there must be something ethereal and profoundly elevating about arising to bear witness—and sacrifice self—for the good of others, so that they might live, even if you must die.      
There is indeed nothing nobler than giving up your life so that others, many of whom you may not even know, can keep theirs, difficult as it is for you and your clay to disconnect and depart from a world to whose umbilicus you are securely and permanently attached and tied by your very nature and earthy-material origin.
In contrast, killing has never been an achievement; and it is at its most despicable when it is not in self-defence or for an eye-for-an-eye retribution or to stop the moral and ethical destruction of society, which are all aspects of self-defence: for, indeed, no one has the right to take life except the One Who gives it. And the martyr who gives it away.
The martyr is different from and above all others because while we tightly cling to the earth, he is happy to leave it; he is happy to sacrifice this life with which everyone is deeply in love; and he longs for a hereafter of which everybody is mortally terrified. And in falling down in conflict with killers, the martyr actually rises; and in being thus conquered and silenced, he in fact conquers the world.       
The preservation of the social fabric of each society is firmly in the hands of those who are in it. God gave each person two heels so that, using them at decisive moments, he could choose to act to make a difference in the direction and ultimate destiny of his society. He can dig in his heels and demand answers from his circumstances, or he can take to his heels and raise questions even about his humanity.                
Unfortunately for us, ours is a society that has—along with its corrupt ragtag soldiery—taken to its heels in active, panic-stricken retreat before the rising dust of terror; but a nation in such cowardly-flight from its problems doesn’t have far to go to reach its Waterloo: because it is already in it.
For, like freedom, the price of safety is eternal vigilance; and it is at its most priceless when it has to be paid in the currency of martyrdom-as Bello has done with total, supreme and final self-effacement. In his place, many would have resigned themselves to the situation as was; or they would have waited for what others or officialdom decided to make of the situation or what they decided to do about it, especially since he had already called the police; or he would have ignored the reality staring at him in the face and continued to hope against hope; or, having discovered the danger inherent in the situation, he could easily have distanced himself from it, in the hope of remaining a living mourner instead of becoming a dead victim.
It is from such individual acts of courage and self-sacrifice that a wounded, frightened and defeated society rediscovers and recovers its dignity and strength. His brave acts has saved lives, emboldened society and pushed it in the direction of the unmasking and conquest of its fear. It could be done because it had been done before. The youths of Azare did it, the elders of Kala-Balge and Rann did it; and today, an individual has risen to tell us that there is no limit to which a human person, who has conquered fear, can rise.
Bello’s martyrdom is undiminished by the fact that he didn’t go out courting it: it came in courting him—and he dug his heels in and didn’t run away. In the circumstances, without his sacrifice, God alone knows the toll that bomb will have taken.          
Initially, Governor Jonah Jang of Plateau State had said it was not a suicide bomb attack but that the people around the garage were bomb makers and the bomb apparently went off prematurely as it was being assembled. But by Wednesday, May 28, the Plateau governor seemed to have changed his mind: he sent his commissioners to condole the widows of the blast victims with a donation of 200,000 naira each. And for good measure, many people in Anguwar Rogo have said that since Boko Haram has not claimed responsibility for either the Terminus Market or the Land Rover Garage blasts, they were left with no alternative but to believe that the bombs might have been detonated by people who wanted to implicate residents in order to repossess the land.