SARS Must End

#SARSMUSTEND

In a corrupt society that does not even try to pretend to hide its corruption, the mindset of the police says “We must chop our own as politicians dey chop“. This is why they became lawless in their behaviour. They are making a picture of what they see and feel within. The Nigerian Youth should be given the chance to think right. Too many jumped into crime in the name of making it. A mechanic I know once saved 120K and used it to buy a laptop for his 16 years old son to start internet fraud! He told me this himself. I cried that day! We should #EndSARS.

Let us know armed robbers when we see them. It is unfair to pretend to be a friend only to get close and stab us in the back. #SARS has become a legal criminal enterprise. The Nigerian police force has always fathered dangerous children. The more things change, the more things remain the same… I have seen protests so many times in my short life; I was there in 1993/1994, I witnessed the sorrow, tears and blood. I saw democracy’s victory in 1999, I saw and I saw and I saw as nothing changed! A friend of mine did a job for a client in Ikorodu, he got paid 560,000 Naira. He took a bus to Ketu to buy some materials for his work. His phone was stolen! Within an hour, his bank account has been emptied by internet fraudsters. I was told there is a way they access your bank account from the sim card. This friend has a wife and two children. He called me with deep pain in his heart. I told him to come to my office, then, in Magodo. We prayed and the thief was afflicted immediately. I tweeted the incident live on twitter that day and folks begged me to be merciful. The young man refunded the money and the affliction stopped.

This young man and his friends are in their twenties. They are not so educated but they know their way around the internet and use it to rob honest people of their gains. There are too many of them in this society! We cannot protest against them! We cannot carry placards against them. We cannot trend tweets against them! Why? They are not authority figures. They are not the government. They will just laugh at us and keep doing whatever they had always desired to do. There was a time the advance fee fraud criminals claimed they were taking reparations from abroad because of the slave trade. Many of us turned a blind eye. Then they will say the money they stole was covered by insurance, yet we turn a blind eye until they began to defraud our relatives and friends! This is a scourge!

#ENDSARS operatives decided to be cashing in on these guys by collecting money from them to enrich their own pockets. This is illegal and criminal in itself! The problem with this was, soon enough they started harassing both the innocent and the guilty for money. I was on my way to my in-laws house on Christmas day of 2015 when they stopped me. I was 35 years old, a father of two and my marriage was five years old. They checked all my papers, everything was in order and then they said I cannot leave until i give them something for Christmas. I didn’t have much cash on me and I told them so. They told me to park and go to the ATM. That was what i did. I left my wife and my two sons in the car and raced to the ATM. This happened on the road where you branch off Apapa Oshodi expressway into Satellite town road. I withdrew some money and settled them. I hated being robbed so blatantly but what shall the son of man do?

Corruption in Nigeria had poisoned every fiber of our society. This is why #EndSarsNow is a must! To give a corrupt heart a gun and uniform is madness! SARS has killed and maimed carelessly to buttress this fact. My prayer is that we all will look at the lives that this protest had taken and decide to live right. Internet fraud is not a job, no excuse justifies it. Crime has its consequence and its consequences are often dire. Lets #EndSARS and #EndRape and #EndCorruption. We can and I pray that we will!