AVOIDING RETRIBUTIVE JUSTICE
BY SIR DON UBANI; KSC, JP
OKWUBUNKA OF ASA

I am not an authority in matters of religion. I do, however, know, through the two religions; African traditional religion and Christianity that I am conversant with, that whatever we, as human-beings, sow, we are bound to reap.

The Bible emphasizes this time-held and honoured reality while my Asa traditional cum Cultural existentialism takes it as given.

I am yet to see any man or woman who disadvantageously exploited and extorted his or her fellow beings that did not end up having his or her children pay very costly for it.

In Nigeria, for instance, majority of the children of Police men whose stock-in-trade is to extort money from innocent citizens, end up as drug addicts, common criminals and irrecoverable pipsqueaks.

This is resultant of curses placed on such dishonest and fraudulent officials by their victims.

The same applies to political office holders who divert public resources to personal and selfish investments. It has always told painfully and badly on their children who ignorantly and erroneously they think they are busy accumulating unnecessary wealth for.

Not intending to deviate from the theme of this essay, my sense of history makes me recall that on the 17th day of January, 1968, the ruling military government of Nigeria heartlessly bombarded refugee camps in both Awka and Umuahia in the then Biafran enclave.

It was a calamity of immeasurable magnitude. Death toll exceeded that recorded by America's hydrogen bombardment of the two Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.

Of course, the sentiment then was driven by tribal irredentism and reckless impunity. As long as the refugees that were being slaughtered through Nigeria's government were Igbo, it meant that no life was being lost.

Being helpless to avenge the spell of massacre that confronted them, the Igbo only resorted to God in prayers.

God, as I believe, has always been patient and forgiving. He, again as I believe, however, does not suffer from the human frailty of amnesia.

I have in some of my thoughts expressed the need for the government and people of Nigeria to tender unqualified apology to the Igbo for the unlimited catastrophe they avoidably visited upon them from 1966 to January 1970.

The blood of innocent Igbo people, especially pregnant women whose wombs were brutally ruptured by the people of Northern Nigeria during the civil war is still waiting for appeasement and cleansing.

It is, therefore, not a mere coincidence and surprise that the same Nigerian government that, contrary to the global rules of engagement, bombarded refugee camps in Awka and Umuahia on 17th January, 1968 repeated the same act of colossal disaster on the 17th of January, 2017, 49 years later but this time not against the Igbo but against people of Northern extraction in a camp hosting internally displaced persons, IDP.

According to speculations making the round, the bombardment was in error, resulting from false intelligence. I think nature must have had a hand in this deadly blow.

Who says there is no retributive justice? What we sow is what we reap!

Okwubunka of Asa
Executive Director
Centre For Equity & Eradication
Of Rural Poverty.

Sure.