THE BYSTANDER

The image will stay with me for years, me standing aloof while a man was getting killed, blood all over his face and clothes. His continuous pleas for mercy, the ring of assaulters and justice dispensers, their makeup - miscreants and yahoo boys, known criminals. Yet, they were the appointed justices on that day.

They had all the power and no check or balance hence justice was swift. There was no time to enter a plea because none was needed. It had been decided by the cries of the supposed victim, the woman who had struck the first match with her voice. She was neither quiet nor loud, she was just the right volume needed to pass it on to other willing participants.

THIEF!!!!!!!!!!!

And in that moment the universe was altered irrevocably. I did not know at the time, but would later find out that this thief was a father, a good one, a brother, a husband, a friend. But to us at that particular moment he was one thing and one thing alone - a thief. A man without a name.

I would always remember that day. All the details. I had had white rice and stew with dòdò as breakfast and I can clearly remember complaining to my mum that rice wasn't really ideal as breakfast and the meal as we had it was not balanced because plantains wasn't really protein. She had laughed me off saying plantain was as good as meat. I remember leaving the house to go to the store where I worked as a salesgirl pending the time school resumed since ASUU was on yet another strike action. This one had lasted 8 months already and what was going on was a protracted negotiation with the Federal Government. The Federal Government says something, it lies as usual, ASUU comes to tell us it's a lie. They set another meeting. FG doesn't show up perhaps to punish ASUU for calling it out on its lie. And yet another month passes without progress. That morning, I had an argument with the store manager about work place sexual harassment. It wasn't really an argument since no one got offended and nothing changed after. I was merely informing him really and he was merely letting me know that was the way things had always been. I told him he encouraged it by letting male customers treat us as they liked and even laughing at their lewd jokes at us. He had replied that I shouldn't really be complaining since the highest tippers were these same men and that if I wasn't okay with it I should stop taking their money and drinks. It stung, what he said but I had kept quiet after that because I knew he had a point there. It was in that moment of silence that we heard it. The first match being struck....

OLÈ!!!!!

The voice came from the shop across. It belonged to an eccentric middle aged woman who sported a low cut dyed blonde. A lot of people me included thought she look like a cock. She was the poster woman for body positivity FC. Ironically. She had bleached her skin to an uneven tone. She fixed too long lashes. She drew her brows with a purple pencil. Above all, she wore confidence like a cloak and lived up to her reputation as "ìyá ibẹ̀". Ìyá ibẹ̀ sold everything from milo to pepper to paint brushes to condoms and paracetamol to gin to toys. She was a loud, saucy and garrulous woman who entertained her customers so well they all came back. She sold well even though her prices were ridiculously higher than usual. So many people said the only reason why she was so prosperous was that she used juju. These same people patronised her but I guess that's how juju is supposed to work. She had heard the young lady who sold childcare products from across her say thief and she had echoed it. When Ìyá ibẹ̀ screamed the entire neighborhood heard. And the ants came crawling out of their holes.

The alacrity with which they got weapons was stunning. Within seconds the man was down. Nobody asked what he stole or from whom he had stolen. They could have had the wrong man and no one would have cared. The boys of the neighborhood flogged him. It wasn't really a flogging. It was more of a battering with wooden logs sprouting nails. Beer bottles were repeatedly broken on his head, even if he had survived, something must have shifted in his brain. Some of them had metal rods, an idiotic drunk had a mopping stick, shop owners left their goods to include their tokens - slaps and curses. Then someone did the needful. They brought in an old tyre, a jerry can of petrol and matches. All these for one man. All these for a Tecno phone worth less than minimum wage. But I guess it would mean a lot in a country where even the most mundane thing was luxury. A country where people begged as an occupation.

When it was all over, as if to assuage their guilt, as if to justify murder, everyone suddenly had something to say except the fact that we had all committed murder. The assaulters and the bystanders and the videographers. All of us. Someone said if he had begged they would have given him money. No one said they could not have given him more than ₦50, that he would have needed to humiliate himself before at least 400 angry and frustrated people to get the worth of that phone. Someone said his mates were porters in the market. Hustling. No one said that the justices of the moment were all unemployed "hustlers". Uncaught thieves. Yahoo boys. Drug peddlers. Someone said if the police had been called in, they would eventually let him go. He would have bribed his way out. They had done right by a thief. That was the consensus.

Olúọmọ did not start out life to become a thief. That was his name. An irony of a name. A joke his parents didn't know they were making eight days into his birth. He started life like every other person, in tears amidst pain and eventually laughter and joy. The course of his life was charted by the unseen hands of poverty so he was born to a father whose frustrations with life started and ended with the bottle and a mother who never looked happy, whose breasts sagged at twenty-three because by then she had mothered three children. She died at forty-three, this mother, looking like an octogenarian. It was decided at her funeral that her history would be rewritten because no one would believe she had only been forty-three. For the purpose of all funeral souvenirs she was sixty. Why life dealt her a cruel hand we would never know. Olúọmọ never got an education. None. He never went to school nor learnt a trade. All he did his whole life was labour, drink, smoke, lust after the luxuries he could never afford. He did odd jobs for a living but that day he had needed cash that could dent a hole in the mounting hospital bills of his wife who had just had a baby. So he took something that did not belong to him. The gist had come in bits and pieces. After the fact. People who knew his mother. People who knew his father. People who knew him. People who thought he was hardworking but drank too much. People who said he had always had a light finger. The people who blamed him for getting murdered. But why would he go and steal? But why would he go and have a baby when he was poor? They all seemed to ask after dropping a new bit about his life.

I was there and I did nothing. I was too scared. Even after so long I can taste the fear mixed with smoke. Raw. Searing. I remember being surprised at how fast he burned. Are we that flammable? It made me wonder if the fire in hell as described is the same fire as we know it. How can we burn forever when there was nothing left of us in minutes?

He had stolen a phone. A Tecno phone worth less than ₦20,000. But he was burned at the stake built by smarter thieves, the ones who never get caught. Sent there by even bigger thieves who deliver the sentence of poverty. I do not know if it was my inaction that day that killed this man but I felt like I had a hand in his death.

I blamed my parents for having money, for giving me an education, for giving me the ability to see the world. To experience luxury even if occasionally. To never know hunger. To never think of stealing. To throw tantrums and get riled up by the existence of homosexuals in my homeland. Yet right before my nose people were dying for surviving. I was privileged and had a hand in the death of every hustler married to the hustle till death did them part.

Amal🍒