“And so the lion fell in love with the lamb…” he murmured. I looked away, hiding my eyes as I thrilled to the word. “What a stupid lamb,” I sighed. “What a sick, masochistic lion.” ― Stephenie Meyer I have two lovely lads, I can’t begin to narrate, explain, introduce, discuss, and analyze how much they mean to their mom or me.
However, once, I took turn to pick them from school and one of them was stuck in the toilet for some 10minutes, in which the whole school searched everywhere for him. Everywhere we looked, but the toilet. I can’t begin to explain every 10 seconds in that everlasting 10 minutes, the trauma, confusion and all that.
So back to Chibok, having commented last week on the schoolgirls abduction, I had in my hope believed by now, we did be talking about the rescue mission, how it happened, who was the hero, but importantly that the girls were with their families. Painfully, we are now on #bringbackourdaughters and #bringbackourgirls, what I would call the usual spot. And before you wonder, what and where is the usual spot, I would tell you, it is that spot where there is an interlude before the closure. In other words I tell us painfully if care is not taken, soon we may consign these girls to history.
So I just wondered, if your daughter, sister, mother, was abducted, in 10secs what would you want. 10secs in the forest of Sim-whatever. 10secs with Boko Haram to get your loved one. What would occupy your mind? Would you be looking for popular human rights lawyer and activist, Mr. Femi Falana (SAN) to sue this administration over its failure to rescue the innocent victims of Boko Haram terrorists? It’s that you would do with10secs only!
Would you spend 10secs-debating Boko Haram as Northern conspiracy against a South-South president? Or bother about soldier motivation, corruption and insincerity on the part of the government in the fight against Boko Haram. In the 10secs that you have, I am not too sure; you would care about WAEC, still trying to find out the exact number of students abducted. It would concern us less that even the Chibok school principal’s story is incoherent.
We just blame the president for everything. We Nigerians like to criticize and score cheap political point without providing the alternatives to the problem. So would you rather go-a-blaming or looking to get our girls. If Boko Haram picked my boys, the last thing on my mind would be whether the government sets up a committee or the 1st lady, is threatening to stage a protest match to Chibok, Borno, if the abducted schoolgirls were not released or volunteering to get shot for them.
We want our girls back, but a friend captures it, saying we didn’t speak out when a governor was stealing billions and cutting the hands of poor citizens who stole chicken just to score a cheap political point. We mad small noise about sanusi and co. but we did not #bringthemoneyback, I could reel out a list of atrocities we did not change…and now to even #bringbackourgirls has become a political tool.
We have spent loads of seconds debating to “To an ordinary Southerner, Boko Haram is the creation of Northern elites to make the Jonathan’s administration ungovernable. To an ordinary Northerner, Boko Haram is the creation of the Jonathan-led government in order to decimate the population of northerners and to destroy their economy. But to Boko Haram there is no distinction between northerner and southerner or Muslim and Christians.
Their goal is to cause terror and their target knows no such bounds.” While others are noisemaking as netzens, and our daughters are out there, so what would I do if I had 10secs? I would tell us this small gist. And leave us to reflect on what matters On July 4, 1952, Florence Chadwick was on her way to becoming the first woman to swim the Catalina Channel. She had already conquered the English Channel.
The world was watching. Chadwick fought the dense fog, bone-chilling cold and many times, the sharks. She was striving to reach the shore but every time she looked through her goggles, all she could see was the dense fog. Unable to see the shore, she gave up. Chadwick was disappointed when she found out that she was only half a mile from the coast. She quit, not because she was a quitter but because her goal was not in sights anywhere. The elements didn’t stop her.
She said, “I’m not making excuses. If only I had seen the land, I could have made it.” Two months later, she went back and swam the Catalina Channel.
This time, in spite of the bad weather, she had her goal in mind and not only accomplished it but beat the men’s record by two hours.
Would we continue fighting each other, trading blames, uncovering and discovering conspiracies, or rather fix our eyes on our goal and neglect all the distraction and discouragement by the elements along our way? Do we really want to #bringbackourgirls, it depends on what our focus is, are we ready to #bringbackourdaughters–only time will tell.
By Prince Charles Dickson