By Atoke
As
the youngest child, I’d constantly give my parents the scoop on things
that went on around the house when their backs were turned. It wasn’t
long before I learned that I suffered more from telling than from
keeping my mouth shut. With cousins and siblings studying at the
Nigerian Military School, Nigerian Defence Academy & Command
Secondary School, I was treated to all sorts of special military type
punishments. Imagine the kind of cruelty that would have thought of
“Angle 90″ but with a Technical Drawing board on your outstretched arms…
loaded with Ababio, PN Okeke, and Modern Biology. I quickly learned to
adopt the posture of a mute, with a worst case scenario being “I didn’t
see anything. I didn’t hear anything. I wasn’t there. I was sleeping”.
For the past 5 days, my neighbours have
been having a jamboree of some sort. The jamboree starts around 11pm.
Children squealing, adults laughing and singing along to equally loud
music. On Friday, I noticed they had installed an extension to their
front porch. The extension was decorated with garlands and blue electric
lights. Ah, that probably explains all the noise; it’s a wedding. So
all weekend, I bore the incredible night noise with quiet resolve. But
something happened last night. It became unbearably loud. It was like
being in bad, loud Karaoke at 2am. They were yelling along to all sorts
of music. I tossed and turned. ‘Make them stop. Let someone get tired.
Let a fuse blow. Something, anything to just give me peace’. It didn’t
happen. So, I reckoned, why not go there and have a nice chat with them.
You know, like in the trailer of that movie Bad Neighbours.
So at a little after 2am this morning, I went over there to knock, just
to say, ‘Please keep it down a bit. I’m trying to sleep. Early start on
Monday’. That sort of thing. I knocked, knocked, and knocked. No juice.
I went back to my room to try and sleep,
but the noise was unbearable. So, I called the police. 20 minutes
after, the problem was solved. But, I woke up this morning feeling like a
snitch. Did I really report a misdemeanor to the police? When did I
become one of those old women who reports noise making?
Then,
I wondered again why reporting was such a bad thing. In light of the
Abuja bombings this morning, I’ve had cause to think about this method
of identifying the source of our problems. I mean, these bomb makers
have neighbours, they have cousins, friends, relatives. Surely somebody
somewhere knows they’re getting up to no good. If your son was building a
bomb in your backyard, would you report? Or are we so terribly scared
of the consequences that we’d rather not say anything?
This morning, someone who would have
gotten to her office, turned on her computer, read Atoke’s Monday
Morning Banter, is dead. She is dead because someone knew that there was
a plan to take explosives to Nyanya park, this morning , and didn’t say
anything.
One wonders if we should be more
proactive by snitching. Maybe we’re not because we feel it’s not going
to yield any rewards anyway. However, I strongly believe in the trickle
down effect. The dominoes rule. Like a house of cards, one tip and it
sets off a chain of effect.
Please share your thoughts with us this
morning, because we need to be able to do something. Not everybody can
be an FBI field agent, that’s why there are Confidential Informants. If
as citizens, we can do something, then maybe we should. If we’re not,
then why? Maybe there’s something else we can do in our own capacity.
Something other than prayers – because we’ve been praying since 1960 and
we still aren’t making progress.
Have a lovely week ahead, against all the odds. It’s such a grim Monday. Keep your head up.
Peace, love & cupcakes.
Toodles!
Photo Credit: thefiercelane.com
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