October 12, 1972, a chartered Uruguayan Airforce plane conveying 45 members of the Christians Club rugby team, including their friends and family members from Montevideo, Uruguay, to Santiago, Chile, for an exhibition match against the Old Boys Club, an English rugby team in Santiago, crashed into the Andes Mountains in Argentina.
For 72 days, the location of the crash couldn’t be found because of the remoteness and vastness of the Andes Mountains. By the time help eventually came after the long ordeal, only 16 survivors were remaining.
The survivors recounted how they had to deal with the extremes before they were rescued, including subzero temperatures, two back-to-back avalanches and near starvation, left with no choice but to eat the flesh of their deceased family members, friends and team mates to stay alive. Cannibals they became!
The story of this crash has been adapted into several films and as I watch snippets of the films these days, they remind me that Nigeria appears to be in the same theater and betaken by heartlessness and cannibalism.
Why did I reach this conclusion? Because of the nature of our work as journalists, all manner of information is dumped on us from citizens who think we can be of help. So, almost all the time, we get some very gory images and videos, some of which have the capacity to traumatize you, all your life.
How in God’s green Earth, will someone pleasure in killing and dicing another human being into pieces and even contemplating or actually consuming the flesh of another of your kind?
There is no one who wants to die yet. Even the most pious preachers of a beautiful and stressless heaven will choose to heal from a painful illness than to die of it and go to that beautiful heaven they preach about. So, I imagine how the person you are killing will beg you fervently for his or her life. How you will ignore the plea and proceed to hurt your kind.
Even if you drug your victim, how exactly do you feel when you are slicing the neck of a human being? Do you imagine the chain of pain you will cascade down to friends, family, loved ones and so many rungs of social interactions? After the heinous deeds, how do you find sleep at night?
I watched some of such beastly videos yesterday and I am still traumatized till now. The images keep flashing in my head. The first video whose location I am yet to identify, adult males are seen outdoors, on a foot path in a village, gleefully dismembering a man they murdered into pieces and recording it themselves. That video is the most traumatic. It is not the first time I am watching something like that, but the heartlessness and calmness with which this was done gives me chills that these humans went back into society and may still be living with the rest of us.
The second is the video of the two hands of the lady that the Ilorin alfa killed in his slaughter coven, in Kwara State.
The other is in Abuja, on a highway where two alleged thieves were caught. See how mercilessly they were stripped naked and beaten to death in the pool of their blood.
You have caught them. Why not hand them over to the Police? They are already subdued under you. Why strip and beat them to death? If the police do that to criminals, will we not bash them? They were so brutally beaten and life was going out of them. But they won’t even give them a chance to say a word until they were murdered in broad daylight.
I am just thinking aloud. I am traumatized. Really badly. Is this part of the human story or is humanity degenerating? Have we always been like this or what exactly is fueling this heartlessness and audacity? Have we become as desperate as the Uruguayan plane crash survivors? I thought that man has advanced beyond this Hobbesian state of nature?
Citizen Agba Jalingo is the Publisher of CrossRiverWatch and a rights activist, a Cross Riverian, and writes from Lagos.
NB: Opinions expressed in this article are strictly attributable to the author, Agba Jalingo, and do not represent the opinion of CrossRiverWatch or any other organization the author works for/with.
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