KILLING IN GOD'S NAME

BY JOSEPH OCHIE

SMASHWORDSEBOOK EDITION

PUBLISHED BY JOSEPH OCHIE.KILLING IN GOD'S NAME

Copy right 2014: JOSEPH OCHIE.

All rights reserved.

No part of the publication may be reproduced, stored in retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission of the copy right owner.

Other books by Joseph G Ochie:

Nelson Mandela Is Not DeadOur Wives Have Gone Mad

Catfish BreedingThird Term President

Jack 1Jack 2

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This e-book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This e-book may not be resold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this e-book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you are reading this e-book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your favourite online retail store and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author and publisher

DISCLAIMER

This book is pure work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents and statements are the products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, or events or locales is entirely coincidental.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

PROLOGUECHAPTER ONECHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREECHAPTER FOURCHAPTER FIVECHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVENCHAPTER EIGHTCHAPTER NINECHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVENCHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEENCHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEENCHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEENCHAPTER EIGHTEEN

PROLOGUE

One hot afternoon, on a bright sunny day, draped in what was my best attire; I was walking along the ever locomotively chaotic Asa Road, either side of which was haphazardly lined with rows of upstairs and bungalows of various sizes, colors and shapes, when all of a sudden I became aware of myself. I was assailed by a strong strange feeling of consciousness. Curious to know why my personality was the centre of attraction of my mind, I stopped and started looking myself over. I looked over my human person from an angle strange in a way I had never done before. I looked at my weather-beaten black shirt, my zebra-striped shirt worn out from long years of use; my rumpled, torn trousers; my tattered shoes and crinkled belt, and since it was so impossible to look and see, my mind immediately went straight to my unkempt hair. The dirty, black-turned-brown tangled hair, for a very long period, had not known any comb – that was what my broken old standing mirror told me a day ago. It was as if it was anathema, abomination, a sin of the highest order for me to allow comb to pass through it. The stench smell coming out of my body was unbearable. My meal that very morning was that of affliction as I drank my water of affliction because I had a scanty provision. I decided to give the matter a thorough attention; and I was led into a deep sleep- like thought.

When it then occurred to me that I had not built a house of my own, as had my age mates abroad, my heart gave out a painful leap of fear of yet another unknown. As I remembered that I was approaching a thirty-year-old mark, had not married, and had no son to call my own, I became helplessly demoralized. When I was reminded that I had tried my hands on many ventures and on an each occasion had failed, the urge to try the more and keep on trying died in me. I was reminded that I was called jack of all trade, but unstable as a flowing body of water and a blowing spiral of whirlwind; I was not excelling.

I had the initiative; I had the skill; I had the education and the expertise; the experience and the native ability that would have earned me a decent living in any more serious nation, yet I was neither not unemployed nor was the environment made conducive for me to do business. I had no hope of bank loan. Nevertheless, there was no welfare package. I had no social security. There was no any unemployment benefit for the thousands of millions of our unemployed youth. My country did not make provision for that. Living in my country was a dead end …

All these analyzed, considered and thought over, I became angered, annoyed, amazed, bewildered, confused, frustrated and surprised that my life, just like my country, was falling to pieces and I was, as my leaders, helpless, hapless and hopeless. There was nothing I could do to halt it; to save the situation. In like manner, our leaders could not bulge to salvage the country from the edge of economic precipice, though their inaction was deliberate. They had the power to salvage the country. But I, like every other youth, had no power to save myself and redeem my being alive. I blamed my misfortune on them. The country’s life was my life. The direction of my life was a direct function of the course of the historical movement of my country.

While this was happening, sweating pedestrians were drifting about, wearily waiting passengers were standing around, and hurrying motorists were speeding along. Hawkers and open- market traders were touting their wares. And the noise generated by these anthill activities was like a high rumbling of thunder.

I wondered if these busy people were not wondering I was mad, for I then thought I was fully convinced I had become a mentally deranged man. Moreover, as though this thought was to clothe itself in reality and action, six dusty, dirty-looking mad fellows of both sexes in ragged clothes and worn-out shoes appeared from nobody-knows-where. They were all marching without direction. As I darted a quick look at them, I heard an unidentified inner voice.

‘These are your kinds,’ the voice whispered.‘Really?’ I asked.‘Yes, join them,’ the voice commanded.‘Good gracious me!’ I heard myself thinking aloud. ‘Tufiakwa! God forbid! That is not my

portion,’ I spat, shrugged, snapped and then swore.‘No. No need for a longwinded argument. Look at them very well. They are your kinds, please

join them,’ the voice insisted.Only then, only after this plea, did I peer closely at them and discover that their ugliness and

dress pattern were but a mere reflection of my outward appearance and outfit. The same might rightly be said of my psychological condition. If madness were to wander without purpose, there was no difference between me and these mad men and women aimlessly caressing the city street. I knew the situation of the country had economically conditioned me to a life of no purpose. But I refused to obey the voice.

Then come to think of it on the other hand: Was I mad? Was I in the process of becoming mad? Or had I become mad?

If I was mad, assuming the answers or any of the answers was in the affirmative, I was frustrated so much so that I wouldn’t have known it. If I was not mad, I was schizophrenic, so much so unable to think clearly that I wouldn’t have discerned it. Discouraged and worried about my inability to make headway in life, to carve an economic niche for myself in this world of superabundance of wealth, I labeled myself a lunatic, though I was not sure. Confused as to whether I was mad or not, I was fully convinced I was on the borderline between sanity and madness; that was the closest similarity to my present psychological state.

Had I any reasonable bosom friend, he would have counseled me, or at least consoled me. A bosom friend, at any rate, should have offered me a useful piece of advice on the best way forward.

That was the point at which Andrew became important. Unfortunately, for me, Andrew, like our ‘Heroes Past’, was no more. He was dead; he had passed on to the land of the dead, the great beyond.

The country lacked exactly what I was missing but, careless as her leaders were, they did not bother about her course. I was bothered about the course of my own life. But I couldn’t help myself. Perplexed and dazed with puzzles, I saw all these as the riddles of life. And not as surprising as it might seem and sound, I was not good at loosening riddles. Riddles, as we know, are a hard nut to crack. Unable, as I was, to solve such riddles, I relapsed into a watching position. I decided to stay put, sit still and watch. But the more I watched in my mind’s eye the direction in which this my wretched life was unfolding, the less I saw and comprehended.

Then I knew that the tragedy, the climax, the denouement of the farce known as my austere life was going to be interesting; or even intriguing, if ever I was to outlive it.

Just as I came gradually alive to the immediate physical presence and regained my partially lost consciousness, I realized that the end of the drama was far out of future sight. When I gained total control over my psychological being, I chuckled to myself, but very much like a sane man and, as was the case of the six mad people with their bearing, headed eastward, though with no direction, not even with the slightest sense of the direction of where I was going. The same was equally true of my country!

CHAPTER ONE

The merged giant creepers, towering above the cloudy horizon, shot fiercely towards the grey sky. The curled undergrowth, few inches high, spread over the whole forest. The forest birds, lost in their enjoyment of the unlimited freedom offered by this serene environment, were singing, chirruping, whistling, dancing and pecking their beautiful plumage. Insects, mind-boggled by the stillness of the bush, were shrilling endlessly. Aside these and the footfall of the fleeing men (as I learnt later) all else was silent.

Apart from one major dense track in the forest, other openings in the thicket could hardly let a man through. Nevertheless, with the handles of their bags slung on their shoulders and the bags themselves hanging slightly, loosely over against their knees, swinging to-and-fro, they silently filed out of the woods on the lonely track that ran through the heart of the forest, the evil forest. They were dressed in formal attires. While some were dressed in a national costume, others were appareled in a more cosmopolitan outfit: suit. Despite their expensive outfits, they were unhappy, and appeared bothered about the source of their unhappiness. My sympathy would have stayed with them, but they looked too worried to be innocent.

‘Was not it unusual to see people in this forest, an evil one for that matter?’ I thought. I was stupid enough to stand in the way of the men who were running for their dear lives. It was not my fault. I only reasoned that such obstruction would be enough to stop them. That was a wrong assertion. They were as swift of foot as a wild gazelle. They advanced as though they would gladly walk through the poor me. From the look of things, they would not mind running me down; and stampeding me to death. In that case, I must be foolish enough to stand in the way of such heartless pack of lazy thieves.

To save my life, I edged out of the tiny footpath to enable them continue their quick, unobstructed successive movements.

Just as half the number had filed past me, the gait of one tall dark man caught my attention. He was moving, but not as fast as the others were. They pushed him, they swore at him. One even cursed him. He swayed; he swaggered and then staggered. As he was moving slowly, any man immediately behind him would walk past him, until he was the last man standing.

‘This fellow could be of help to me. He is a bit different from the rest,’ I thought aloud. I waved him to a stop. He looked at me suspiciously. When he was satisfied that I could not have

possibly been an enemy, he obeyed and stopped. I looked rearward and saw a fat man who, his rich agbada cloth caught in the thicket, was struggling effortlessly to extricate himself from the gripping wooden web, as it appeared very much obvious that he was not going to make it out of the forest with the rest. With the exception of the man I stopped to talk with, he was many miles behind others. ‘Poor him,’ I thought, but not aloud.

‘Where are you going all dressed up like this?’ I asked my acquaintance.‘Haven’t you heard?’ he retorted questioningly, looking around with fear painted on his face.‘Heard what?' I pursued relentlessly.‘Haven’t you heard that we are now through?’ He continued his barrage of questions.‘Through with what?’ I asked again, becoming more puzzled and inquisitive.‘Haven’t you heard, or have you but are pretending not to have heard that we are now through

with jungle life and are going home?’ He queried again.‘I still have not understood what you mean,’ I sighed regrettably.‘Look around and see whether you can see any other sign of life except these tress and us, the

escapees. This is no home. It is a jungle and a very thick one, as you can see. I repeat, we are done with jungle life and are going home,’ he recounted in detail.

‘Really, I see,’ I said, nodding severally, but still very much in the dark and I said so.‘Look,’ he shot at me, ‘please, don’t waste more of my time here. We have a limited time if

not living on borrowed time. It will soon be over. And you know time is money.’This fellow was hiding something from me. Whatever he was hiding, I did not know. He was

not plain. He was speaking figuratively, nay in proverbs, or even parables. I could not very much understand him. Transfixed thus to the spot, as I was paralyzed by his riddles and hazy proverbs with perspiration pouring down my face, I heaved a sigh, but not that of relief.

‘You made mention of home. Where exactly is your home?’ I asked him, looking sideways as if to assure myself that his colleagues had not overheard me. At the same time, I was engrossed in watching the captor and his captive. I did not know that my acquaintance was observing me with a rising anger.

‘Look, Mr. Man, if you are not ready for the answers to your questions, let us call it a day,’ he barked at me.

‘I am listening to you,’ I told him.‘You are listening to me and looking elsewhere? Do you not know that sight and hearing work

hand in hand?' And wherever the eyes are there will the ears always be gathered: audio-visual,’ he confirmed.

‘I was paying attention to what you were saying,’ I told him, trying to deceive him, or so I imagined.

‘What was the last thing I said?’ he queried.This floored me. I had no answer for the question. ‘Go on. You have a limited time,’ I

reminded him, diverting his attention from further questions.

‘These people you have just seen were the leaders of the country in the just concluded regime. They are hurrying home, thinking that what they spent years looting could be confiscated from them. They are the appropriators that would have been expropriated.’ He broke off when he noticed that I had recoiled. Something in his brief explanation had struck me.

‘Did you say country?’ I asked him.‘Yes,’ he said gravely. ‘This is Kistan, as you will see very soon.’‘Population is one of the hallmarks of a country. Apart from these fleeing fellows, I see no

people,’ I said, looking baffled.‘This is a country, but is no home,’ he affirmed.'How can a country not translate into home?' I asked.'I don't know. But take it or leave it; this is no home,' he insisted.‘Are you going home with them?’ I asked.‘Yes,’ he nodded repeatedly.‘So this is not your home?’ I questioned him further.‘Yes,’ he affirmed again. ‘We have many homes. As for me, I have a home in Washington DC;

I have a home in New York, Florida, London, Manchester City; Berlin; Bon, Parish, Dubai, Beijing, Tokyo, Rome, Seoul and Pyongyang. So has any of these people and each of these homes is more expensive than the homes of both the prime minister of the Great Britain and the president of the United States of America put together.’

‘These homes must have gulped down more than half the resources of the country?’ I stared interrogatively.

He opened mouth in defiant rejection of my claim and assertion. ‘More than,’ he said.‘But you are too good to join them. I see you as a good man,’ I told him.‘It is true. I was once a good man, criticizing everything that went wrong in the forest,

denouncing every evil act. I did not know when I was indoctrinated into their way of life: stealing, plundering, and looting of the forest reserves. It is not my fault,’ he said, looking contrite.

‘Can you not make amends for all you have done wrong and turn over a new leaf?’‘I am now irredeemable,’ my acquaintance said sadly.I was a bit naïve or smart by half to assume that my fellow discussant was not as corrupt as his

co runaways were. I was now none the wiser. He told me to turn round and see a strange sight. Eager to feed my eyes like Moses of old in the burning bush, I turned sharply, but did not see anybody. Not satisfied, I stared as far as the horizon, but I did not see any man. I looked sideways and could not see any person within my line of vision.

‘I haven’t seen anybody,’ I said, turning to face my acquaintance, but instead of him, boundless empty space was staring at me. I looked around, but did not see him. I combed the whole forest to see if he was hiding somewhere among the undergrowth, only to discover no trace of him. ‘This Fellow has beguiled me,’ I said to myself.

When I went to the spot at which that man was trying to free himself from the choking grip, I was surprised that he had escaped. How he managed to do that was still mindboggling. He was pinned and tied in so tight a way that I imagined there was no how he could have been freed without the assistance of a third party. In addition, the fleeing men were so much wrapped up in the thought of their own safety, that I thought they could not contemplate stopping one second to rescue him. At any rate, he was loose and let go by one of his partners-in-crime.

This fellow diverted my attention so that they would escape. They had escaped. They saw me as the only obstacle to their escape route. They needed that my acquaintance to confuse me so as to make the coast clearer for them. I should not have trusted him. Everywhere now was calm. The forest, devoid of lives, was only painting. I was the only living soul in the entire forest.

As though a spell was cast, the hitherto silent forest, all of a sudden, started swarming with people who were shouting; people who were shaking their heads in rage; people who were cursing. The people sighed; they made faces and complained bitterly. There was accusation, but no counter accusation. The accused had escaped. They were on the run. They had no time to counter the accusation leveled against them.

Thirsty for the blood and hungry for flesh of the escapees, the accusers wielded clubs, they dangled Dane-guns; they carried arrows and spears; they clutched daggers; they held hand grenades; they clasped rocket launchers, they armed themselves with AK 47 rifles, magazines and machine guns. They were in search of the fleeing looters. Incensed, their anger gave way to a resolute decision: ‘Whoever is caught among the fleeing men, would be made to face the full wrath of the law.’ They saw themselves as one.

One man was yelling at the top of his voice. He appeared the most vocal, the most annoyed. I wondered if he would not shout out his spleen. This man was telling a pathetic story. He said that he was not an undergrowth as presented in the motion picture I saw. He said he was the Inspector General of Police. His men arrested one of the escapees I saw. They were about to have him thrown into jail for financial crimes, corrupt practices and other related offences when he received a threatening call to mind his own business and warn his boys not to go further step than they had already taken, unless he wanted to lose his job. He had no option than to obey since the caller was one of those who, in the first instance, ensured that he got the job after paying large sum of money for it. He called his boys to order. The Investigation Panel he set up to try the criminals then ceased to exist.

It appeared as if I was the only spectator among the yelling angry mob. Every other person was both motional and emotional. I then knew I was both a participant and a non-participant observer. The pandemonium and its resultant hubbub continued. Before the multitude were empty executive seats. It seemed as if nobody was interested in those seats.

In a flash, a group of well-fed men, which was manifested in the chubbiness of their cheeks, with office files tucked under their armpits, in a single file, walked inside. In their wake was a middle-aged woman with a wrapper wound round her waist down her legs and a blue shawl draped across her shoulders. She looked more sophisticated than those men in whose company

she was did. They moved to the empty executive seats, which none of the masses indicated interest in. As soon as the officials had taken their seats, silence descended upon the mammoth crowd.

The men on the executive seats consulted among themselves in low tones. When they were through with their consultation, they faced the hungry-looking masses.

The executive men on the executive seats seemed to be in a solid agreement with the standing crowd. Their unspoken common agenda was to crush a common enemy: corrupt men. That was very much obvious. The crowd was persuaded to lay down their arms and they did.

While I was watching this flickering scenario, I noticed that a man on the green and white seat, the prominent seat, did not as much as stir. He was not talking. Whenever he was rumored to have made a statement, the words usually came from a man immediately behind him, and as soon as the words were out, the man immediately behind him would come out, stand before the crowd, and in a more audible voice, rehearsed the same words he had spoken moments ago as the words of his eminence. Trickery and treachery of the highest order hanged in the atmosphere. Was this man playing this trick on me only, or was it his common trick on all? Whom was he trying to hoodwink? He pulled the wool over their eyes. He did this for a number of times.

I looked at the crowd and discovered that they were growing restive. Loud grumbles had begun to reach the high table. They had become weary of this trickster’s frivolous round of bag of tricks.

Now, the only woman among the executive men, with a heavy security presence round about her, was telling those who cared to listen that the inside of the forest, obviously full of dead leaves, animals’ carcasses and dirt, was not so much important as the name. Wherever she went, her entourage followed her with a brass band and, as the band played, they danced, they jumped, and they turned over completely with their feet over their heads on the ground; in the mid air. They gamboled. It was all fun.

What the forest needed now was ‘relabeling.’ The word she said must be on the lips of all and sundry. It was the most important slogan at that very critical moment, as that alone held their key to economic development. Since everybody knew how incorrigible, irredeemable and irremediable the country was, the citizenry should package a story that sounded plausible; and sell to the outside world.

‘We are a laughing stock or have been made so in the comity of nations,’ she said at one of her public lectures. ‘Let us in our characteristic manner of self-deception and tell the entire world that we are not as black as we are painted.’

The name, according to her, was more valuable than the product. The product, no matter how bad it was, even if it had expired, was not a problem, as a shining label could easily make up for the fault of the product. As long as the outside world could be deceived to believe that: ‘the essence lied in the name and not the product, everything would be okay’. Straining at the leash to get her words out, she succeeded in convincing the crowd or a cross section of it with the

masculinity that completely gave a false impression of her feminine feature that ‘relabeling’ would do the magic.

At first, everybody listened to her with rapt attention.‘Only time will tell whether this attention would continue,’ I said to myself.Now, one man was complaining bitterly that the green and white seat by right belonged to his

master.‘To all appearances my boss is entitled to that prominent seat,’ he pointed to the green and

white seat, ‘after his first selfless service to his fatherland as a military head of state. He built the longest bridge in the whole of Africa, brought SAP, the one people erroneously think sapped the economic resources of the forest.’

He rattled of how his master built a bridge where there was no water and how he built castles in the air. How his master created a vast empire of wealth.

‘But why are his children living abroad and not at home to enjoy their father’s creation?’ a voice asked.

The mammoth crowd broke into excitement.‘His parameters of judgment and development would seem right to a total stranger and not to

us that lived as adults during his master’s reign of terror and settlement,’ a second voice answered.

There was a buzz of agreement.‘No amount of good which you claim your master did, maybe only for you and your family

members, will cancel out the atrocities and corruption his government and that of the man following him led the forest into,’ the first voice said.

The people now were talking in low tones.‘You failed to recount the numbers of deaths and orphans created during the era in which your

master was in power,’ the second voice continued. ‘The ninety nine soldiers he killed just in a particular day.’

‘And the editor’s death,’ the first man put in.Confused, the man broke his silence, ‘But my master holds the view up until today that the

News Editor died by a parcel bomb instead of a letter bomb, as widely wrongly speculated.’‘But,’ the first man continued, pointing, ‘your boss initially denied to have known how the

Editor died. Now he is telling us through you the difference between a letter bomb and a parcel bomb. That the Editor died of either a letter bomb or a parcel bomb is a mere semantic confusion. Bomb is bomb. One day your master will wake up and admit publicly that he killed the Editor. Time will tell.’

Something spectacular was happening. There was a brief altercation among the men at the high table. Divided into two main groups, the men were exchanging fisticuffs. It seemed as if one group did not want the slavish and servile crowd to know what was happening. The men in the opposed group were shielding the man on the prominent seat from the probing gaze of the crowd. They were determined to keep up appearances, hide the true situation of the leadership of

the forest. Nevertheless, the leader of the splinter group gave every appearance of letting the cat out of the bag. The opposing group was trying desperately to expose whatever it was the reactionary group was covering. As this scuffle continued, a woman I was seeing for the first time with an Islamic hood over her head and a black shawl tied across her shoulders who seemed to be at her wits end, was shouting frantically, ‘It can’t happen.’

She stood over the prominent seat as though she was to sit on it as soon as it became empty. She had her way.

Defeated, angered, sad and dejected, the leader of the opposition group, in a feminine swagger, strolled out of the committee of executives. His men brought up the rear. I later saw him as he was touring round the forest, making consultations.

At this point the attention of the crowd was drawn. The man on the prominent seat was visibly seriously sick, and since there was no functional hospital in the forest, he was to be flown abroad for quick medication. As soon as the seat became vacant, loud murmurs began to reach the high table again.

‘Show us his eminence,’ was chanted everywhere. The multitude sighed, shrugged but none was bold enough to shout louder than the rest. Their shouts were on the same plane.

Just as tension mounted high, one tall, lanky, grey haired old man, with a shrunken jaw, sandals on his feet, in a white costume, probably in his seventies, the leader of a struggle he termed ‘Save the Forest’, appeared with a group of able-bodied old men. They could be hundred or more. Followers seemed to draw strength and boldness from leader.

They were marching and chanting, ‘Show us his eminence.’Young men and women were standing arms akimbo watching the procession of these older

men. They were surprised at the agility that completely bellied the old age of these men. Written on the faces of these young people was, ‘Were we not incapacitated, were we made to grow into responsible young men like you by you, we would have been the ones leading the struggle and saved you the strength of your old age.’

Carrying olive branch and placards, the marching men moved towards the high table. They could not have covered half the short distance between the multitude and the few committees of executives at the high table when security agents sallied and chased them. They scattered in different directions only to regroup almost immediately. They in simulated-like way continued the demonstration until the man occupying the prominent seat was brought back on a stretcher and ensconced on the prominent seat.

There was a statement from him that he had returned hale and hearty, but it was now obvious that he was too weak to speak. Another was doing the work, playing the prank. The man on the prominent seat had lost the legitimacy and the good will of a cross-section of the people.

The crowd’s shout to have him removed was ignored. However, when the lanky old man with his cowardly followers appeared again and the people shouted the more, the man on the green and white seat was borne away on a hearse. A faction of the committee of executives followed the hearse. The woman with the Islamic hood on her head was wailing.