By Okeme Arome Romey I drove into the hospital to some startled faces obviously shaken by some event that had occurred to which, I inferred, must be sacrilegious judging from their murmuring and muttering in groups as though to avoid eavesdropping ears lurking around. I was to understand shortly what this eerie aura was all about. I put off my ignition and made towards the accident and emergency, and there, lying on his right side, was a male figure. He had a hole on his left outer chest which appeared to have been drilled by a blunt metal, or a drilling machine or just something, and exiting from the back just directly opposite the direction it had entered from. This wound gaped wider than that in front. Across the floor on the emergency couch, laid a woman, who was to be Professor Halimatu Sadiyya, a former commissioner for education in Katsina state. She was not lying out of sheer sybaritism, rather, she was forced supinely out of pain and discomfort. Her right upper limb dangled from a fracture in the upper arm. She also had two holes; one at the outer part of the upper arm and the other, a larger one, on the other side of the arm, in the axilla. Errmm, make that three; she had one directly opposite the last one that went into her chest and disappeared there. My colleague was hard at it on her. His fingers moved methodically like a machine, instruments took turns as he worked. Pressure, mopping and finally reducing the fracture while she had, hanging by her side, some IV fluid running. I dove at work too instinctively on the young man. The ragged, dark and burnt out edges gave away the wounds as those inflicted a bullet. He had flailing ribs with paradoxical breathing. Within a short time we were done. At least with this emergency response, they should be able to get to a specialist alive to get more definitive management. During our intervention, we had instructed the nurse on duty to place a call on the FRSCN to make their ambulance available so as to conveyed, in good time, the victims to a more equipped hospital in Kaduna. This unfortunately took forever. They didn’t come. After about an hour of stabilizing them and requesting for the ambulance, they began to get restless, breathe faster and grew weaker. The boy was the more stable, though he had lost so much blood and getting paler, he still held on quite stably. I ordered for his blood group and the result was a double whammy; he was B-negative! Have I told you the cause of this heartbreaking scene? Well here we go; The Abuja–Kaduna express road has been the epicenter where the highwaymen conducted their businesses unhindered and unperturbed for years now. Last Wednesday being 18th of July, they had a field time where the visited road users around Azara, a little after katari, with carnage, havoc and death. There was no form of resistance even though a police station was just a stone’s throw from where the action took place. On the 22nd of July, a Sunday, in the breezy evening of what could be assumed to be a bright day at about 6pm, commuters happily plied the road as they prepared to resume work at Abuja or just traveled to various destinations after the weekend. This road is very important as it is about the only road connecting North-west Nigeria to the Federal Capital territory, Abuja. Such a time, it was, when the men of the underworld chose to strike and unleash mayhem. An account of what transpired was well narrated by the driver of the car, in which the boy lying in the hospital, gave in Hausa language. He narrated as follows and I translate here albeit not verbatim; "We ran into them just a little after Kurmin Kare, there were a lot of them on the road and we had to stop as they were robbing people in the distance, I made to reverse and escape, when suddenly, the calm of the evening was disrupted by gunshots as I didn’t know they were in the bushes behind us. They shot at us killing a couple of people in my car and I had to stop and dropped flat on the ground. The shooting must have lasted about 5 to 10min. There were cars behind us that had been unfortunate as well. They ransacked and rummaged through our belongings and fetched what they would. At this point, the young man ( he who was being managed in the hospital) raised his head up and one of them noticed, accosted, and accused him of trying to mark their faces(he spoke with a Fulani accent) and rang three shots that reechoed into the silent evening air, he had shot the young man. I was asked to stand up, empty my pockets and bring forth all the money I had. I obeyed. Just as I was about to assume my initial lying position, another round of gun fire cracked, I looked in the direction it had come from, just a little in front of me and noticed they had just killed a military personnel and a little girl presumably his daughter while another fled into the bush with bullets following his trail. He could or couldn’t have been hit, I couldn’t say. After an hour of activity, the group took their time and graciously sauntered away into the bush from whence they had emerged. Shortly after, the police arrived. I cursed them severely under my breathe. On a normal day, the police van was usually stationary at Gidan Bussa Bridge, some 2km before and another, after kurmin kare, just close to the seminary there. Today they were conspicuously absent".
That’s all I could extract from him as he appeared distraught and had to let him be. It took another 2hrs as I had earlier posited before the FRSCN were convinced after presumably receiving several calls from elites in Abuja and beyond. Before they arrived however, we had had to get a rickety ambulance that we weren’t sure of its ability to move an hour without breaking down, to convey the prof to Kaduna of which it struggled to, but before it could arrive the hospital, she had given up the ghost. The young man, driven in the car of the prof’s daughter, luckily survived. Until the time of this narrative, I was told he was still struggling for his life. I must commend the daughter of that prof. She had summoned uncommon strength and courage in the face of what seemed to be a profoundly discouraging moment. Nigeria isnt working in so many sectors, so many, trust me. She isn’t. I shall, as always, provide my own solutions to these problems as I am wont to doing knowing all too well that I will only be wasting my time as this government, like the others before it, is not one that takes advice. We, as a people and a government, have failed this professor and former commissioner and the other souls lost that day by our actions and inactions. May they rest well"
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