October and the conscience of a nation, By Cyril Abaku

I propose that October be recognised as our National Month of Conscience. Not a month of ceremonies alone. Not a period of official speeches and wreath-laying. But a time for national reflection, truth-telling and the deliberate work of confronting unresolved injustice.

Nigeria marked two painful anniversaries in the past week. On 19 October, we remembered Dele Giwa, the founding editor of Newswatch magazine, who was killed by a parcel bomb at his Ikeja residence in 1986. A day later, on 20 October, we remembered the #EndSARS protests and the avoidable violence that followed, six years ago.

Two national tragedies. Thirty-four years apart. Yet they throw up the familiar question: what does a nation do when it has deaths it cannot explain, injustices it has not resolved and, consequently, closure it fails to provide?

Giwa’s assassination was once a rallying point for Nigerians of conscience. But the years seem long passed. Some of the voices that kept the flame of his memory alive have died. Others have grown old. The public outrage has also faded. Forty years after his murder, the country still has no satisfactory account of who killed him, who ordered the killing and why.

The failure to resolve Giwa’s murder has always borne a common thread: official foot-dragging, official lacklustre, made more troubling, lately, by the Federal Government’s apparent disregard for a judicial order directing it to investigate the killing and prosecute those responsible. Media Rights Agenda (MRA) has renewed its call for the government to comply fully with the order secured by the organisation at the Federal High Court in Abuja on 16 February, 2024, in a case against the Attorney-General of the Federation. MRA’s Deputy Executive Director, Ayode Longe, said the government had demonstrated no concrete progress towards establishing the facts, identifying those responsible or pursuing accountability.

The Attorney-General of the Federation must now provide Nigerians with a clear account of the steps taken to implement the order. The passage of four decades cannot extinguish the State’s responsibility to pursue accountability for an unlawful killing.

The anniversary brought another wound to the surface. In October 2020, young Nigerians took to the streets to protest police brutality, particularly the abuses associated with the now-disbanded Special Anti-Robbery Squad. Their demands were clear. They wanted an end to unlawful arrests, extortion, torture and the killing of citizens by those sworn to protect them.

The protests spread across the country. They also ended in violence. In Lagos and elsewhere, lives were lost. Six years later, the questions remain. Who died? Under what circumstances? Who bears responsibility? And what has changed enough to assure Nigerians that the same abuses will not happen again? These are not questions that an anniversary should merely recall. Rather, they call for answers.

The controversy, three years ago, over a leaked memo indicating that the Lagos State Government approved ₦61.285 million for the mass burial of 103 people identified as #EndSARS victims is not easy to erase from memory. The document circulated widely on social media. Its claims have been contested, and the public deserves a clear, credible account of what it really sought to serve.

The government cannot expect a matter of such gravity to disappear beneath the weight of time. If the document is genuine, its meaning must be explained. If its claims are inaccurate, that too must be established with evidence. The identity of those buried, the circumstances of their deaths and the basis for the burial arrangements should not remain matters of speculation.

And there is a question that still hangs over the violence of October 2020. Who ordered the shooting at Lekki? What happened in the hours before and after the deployment of soldiers? These questions are not invitations to endless argument. A state that exercises force in the name of public order must be prepared to account for the use of that force.

There is a larger question of accountability. The disbandment of SARS was necessary, but was it ever enough? A police unit can be dissolved. A name can be changed. Uniforms can even be replaced. But if the habit of abuse remains, the problem has merely changed its appearance.

Reports of unlawful arrests, detention beyond 48 hours, extortion and other forms of police brutality are still with us. The promise of reform can only be measured against the experience of citizens, not the announcements of government.

And there is a question that still hangs over the violence of October 2020. Who ordered the shooting at Lekki? What happened in the hours before and after the deployment of soldiers? These questions are not invitations to endless argument. A state that exercises force in the name of public order must be prepared to account for the use of that force.

But Nigeria’s October wounds reach far beyond Dele Giwa and #EndSARS. The country has a long list of unresolved killings and assassinations. How about Barnabas and Amaka Igwe. The chilling brutality of their murder. In his account, The Slain Igwes and Babel of Police Investigations, Aham Uba gave chilling details of the horror spectacle that was the way they were killed. It was nothing short of murder that went on to take out even the very words that should describe it. Here are excerpts from Uba’s report:

“Barnabas and Blessing (Amaka) Igwe, both lawyers, it will be recalled, were brutally murdered in Onitsha town in 2002… They were on a visit to a family friend on the fateful day when assassins trailed and mindlessly hacked them down. The hoodlums dealt machete blows on the NBA chairman, shooting him three times. Blessing, his pregnant wife, was given machete cuts on her waist, almost severing it from the knee region, separating the upper torso from the lower one. The attack, amongst other things, left a deep wide gash on her waist from her backside. And, apparently to ensure that the couple did not survive the attack, the assailants ran their vehicles over them and fled. Even Blessing’s cries that she was pregnant, and that her unborn baby should be spared, did not touch the stone hearts of the murderers, as they went ahead with their murderous assignment.”

Then, the Apo Six. Add to that, Bola Ige. Funso Williams. Marshal Harry. Monday Ndor. Aminasoari Kala Dikibo. Eunice Olawale. Alex Badeh. Alfred Rewane. Kudirat Abiola. Brigadier-General Lasun Odeleke. Dipo Dina, etc. How about Mohammed Yusuf, whose death, under very contestable circumstances, is often cited as the fuel that made a local problem in Borno state balloon into the national terror crisis Nigeria is dealing with today. At the last count, the deaths run into tens of thousands. Locals say it could be more, given the problem of ungoverned spaces that has put several communities beyond the reach of data gathering. The displaced? Millions.

Victims’ names briefly pierce the news cycle, sometimes compelling government to shift from denial to acknowledging its failures. What we saw in Kurmin Wali, Kaduna State, following coordinated attacks on churches is a case in point. Communities mourn; the nation stirs, then forgets, until another tragedy renews this ritual cycle. From habitual doublespeak to institutional exhaustion, one sometimes worries if we aren’t already bequeathing a generation for whom justice and civic ethics are little more than abstractions.

This is where national memory comes into the picture – not to merely remember the dead but to preserve the truth about how they died, why their deaths mattered and what the living must do differently. It is also the willingness to confront uncomfortable facts about the state, its institutions and the failures that made certain deaths possible.

What, then, should Nigeria do?

The dates already offer a pathway for us to move towards restitution and restoration. The 1st of October is Nigeria’s Independence Day. It invites us to reflect on the promise of freedom and the meaning of citizenship. The 19th of October marks the anniversary of Dele Giwa’s assassination. It should remind us of the dangers faced by journalists, the importance of press freedom and the cost of leaving political violence unresolved. The 20th of October 20 recalls the #EndSARS protests and the violence that followed.

I propose that October be recognised as our National Month of Conscience. Not a month of ceremonies alone. Not a period of official speeches and wreath-laying. But a time for national reflection, truth-telling and the deliberate work of confronting unresolved injustice.

The dates already offer a pathway for us to move towards restitution and restoration. The 1st of October is Nigeria’s Independence Day. It invites us to reflect on the promise of freedom and the meaning of citizenship. The 19th of October marks the anniversary of Dele Giwa’s assassination. It should remind us of the dangers faced by journalists, the importance of press freedom and the cost of leaving political violence unresolved. The 20th of October 20 recalls the #EndSARS protests and the violence that followed. It should compel us to examine the conduct of security agencies, the use of state force and the relationship between citizens and the institutions meant to protect them. There are no freedoms without security and there is no security without freedom.

These dates, placed within a single national period of reflection, could help Nigeria build a more deliberate culture of remembrance. But the exercise must go beyond the three anniversaries. We should create room for other unresolved killings, disappearances, massacres and acts of political violence. The names already mentioned are only a few among many.

The government should establish a transparent process for reviewing unresolved cases of major public concern. Families of victims should have access to information and a clear channel through which they can seek answers.

We can also learn from countries that have confronted histories of mass violence and state failure. Rwanda comes to mind. What they have done in the post-genocide years offers lessons in this direction if we were willing to shed our culture of self-denial for meaningful action. Silence is not healing. Nor is forgetting.

The dead cannot be brought back. The pain of their families cannot be undone. Yet a nation can still acknowledge what happened. It can investigate what remains unknown. It can hold those responsible to account where the evidence supports it. And it can change the institutions that allowed the violence to happen.

The next October should therefore not find us in the same place. It should be a period in which Nigeria looks at itself without evasion. Our wounds are wounds of conscience. They require truth and justice, as well as the courage to act.

The actual work begins when we stop asking how long ago the wounds were inflicted and start asking why they remain open.

We may begin at once!

Cyril Abaku is a news producer with News Central Television in Lagos.