This is why SARS must end…
“
I feel the bile rise to my throat and almost come out from my nostrils.”
Seven-thirty pm, in the city of Lagos, on the fifteenth day of June, one day to our birthday- my twin brother and I- I’m home, feeling refreshed from the bath I have just had. All day, I had arranged my room, unpacked the last of my suitcases, colour-coded my shoes and lingerie and listened to this new playlist I created and named “slow whine”, so I rewarded myself with that warm bath.
I let my tired muscles soak in the Egyptian rose bath which I had left running for a full ten minutes, at low pressure. After this very relaxing bath, I proceed to slowly dab the trails dry, so that I can moisturize my skin with what’s left of my cocoa-butter body lotion. The smell of amber and wood fills my squeaky-clean room, as my incense is burning at full combustion. Outside, I can see that the sky is getting momentarily stained with bright lines of lightning and in the distance, I can hear thunder stomping as he approaches. Rain. Yes!
My phone rings, unknown caller ID. “Hi”, I say, “Tumise speaking”. The person on the other end of the line is in a hurry. Frantic, too. “Tee, it’s Folarin. Where’s daddy?”. My brother is my best friend, he’s also the calmest person I know (read: strongest). I know him like I know the back of my hand and here he was, sounding scared. Petrified, even. The events that followed this call are such that I think about and they feel unreal and too vivid, at the same time…exactly how a nightmare would.
I have really heard about it. My family is a closely-knit one consisting of my momma, my dad, Fola and me. We have extended maternal and paternal family members and we keep in touch with them- we pray for them and help them out in any way we can. But, nothing personal. No visits and stuff, we only see when we see.
My momma didn’t have it easy in the early years of her marriage and they kind of exacerbated the situation…both sides of them. My dad’s side wasn’t welcoming of an Igbo woman who “went to school” and her parents (especially her dad) almost disowned her just from hearing that she was in love with and eager to wed a Yoruba boy… “that Yoruba boy”. They conquered sha and were wed. Then, they didn’t get pregnant in the first seven years of their marriage and I’m sure you can imagine the drama this brought on: snide side remarks (and not-so-side ones), pressure, anxiety, regret too. But, my parents have one of those fairytale-type loves; the type that can weather any kind of storm and not get submerged. Their faith in God and love for each other fanned the embers of their unity relentlessly into a constantly combusting tinder. In the first month of the eighth year, they birthed my twin brother and me . None before us, none after us.
Igo and give the phone to my dad. He’s in the middle of an international call. He hangs up when he hears that it’s Fola calling. Fola has been stopped by the men of the Special Anti-robbery Squad (SARS) and he has been interrogated vigorously and taken to the station for more questioning about why his laptop is brand new when he says he’s just graduated and is waiting to be posted for the national youth service corps (NYSC).
My dad calls my momma who is on her way back from work and tells her to meet us at the station which Fola has named. My dad and I head over there as well.
When we get there, we try to contain our emotions- we are feeling quite a ton of them- so that we can ask the right questions- not that it has ever made any difference.
“Yes?”.
“Good evening, officer”, my dad says- he has already pleaded with me not to say anything since we both know I am the opposite of polite in situations like this.
“Any problem?”, this officer replies…and that’s the last thing I hear before I zone out.
Now, let me tell you what I can see from where I am standing: this station is filthy; the waste bin is spilling over, there’s what looks like smudged blood and feces on the paint on the wall a few metres from where I’m standing; there’s no electricity either, so everywhere is dark with many sinister-looking shadows cast by the only source of light in the entire room (heck, maybe even in the entire building) which is a flimsy 4-bulb torchlight, placed away from the face of the officer at the desk. The air is stale and the room is stuffy. The floor is also getting wet as the drizzles have started to come. This officer is sweating, red eyes with angry lines, scorched lips, ugly fingers that have clearly tilled the earth and infused dirt under his nails, sweat marks around the armpit and neck regions of his discoloring shirt.
I zone back into consciousness and realize that my momma has joined us and she’s talking to another man who has just joined the officer. He’s dressed in mufti and reeks of a putrid mix of death and decay. I walk up to where my momma is standing and I awkwardly squeeze her shoulders.
At this point, they bring my brother out with a statement which he has supposedly written and signed. My momma is a lawyer, so, she moves to pick up this document. Clearly, my brother hasn’t written it- it’s not in Fola’s handwriting.
I try to take a good look at Folarin. He’s evidently shaken. He’s also bruised on his left shoulder and left cheekbone. There is congealed blood on his earlobe, sitting on what looks like a tear in the skin of the lobe. I feel the bile rise to my throat and almost come out from my nostrils.
I remain quiet, but my eyes are telling my brother that I am sorry. I’m sorry that he has finally lived this reality; one that nearly sixty percent of our friends and friends’ friends have experienced and narrated. One of them, Stella, was even raped, after getting beaten like a thief. This girl walked out of her house to the junction of her street, to escort her friend who had visited and that was her crime. We didn’t hear from her until the evening of the following day- she’d been picked up without her phone and ATM cards and denied access to a phone call. So, she was beaten and raped for being useless to them. Some people have said that she was even lucky since they didn’t kill her. I also heard about one pregnant woman from the next street who was kicked in her belly in the process of a raid carried out by these same men and she miscarried her seven-month-old foetusg.
These criminals are threatening to transfer my brother to God-knows-where, that he is an armed robber and he will be convicted. I can believe neither my eyes, nor my ears. Finally, they collect the sum of two hundred and fifty thousand naira to “settle amicably”. Settle what?! My dad makes a wired transfer from his mobile phone and we get on our way. They return what’s left of his clothing, car keys, laptop and phone; they don’t return his wristwatch, they would be keeping it to “use am remember” him. For those of you who don’t understand this, it means that they have seized his wristwatch because they want it to serve as a reminder of him. A reminder that you molested and threatened a young man for no reason and still stole from him and his parents? skskskskskskkssks. Yea, sure, please go ahead.
Apparently, they have also deflated his tyres, so we can’t do anything about that tonight. We get in my dad’s car and my mum follows us behind. It is the longest and most quiet ride I’ve had. Midway through, Fola starts wailing. He’s buried his face in his palms and is sobbing uncontrollably, his entire body shaking. I come undone where I’m seated in the back and I let the tears roll out freely. I hate this country. I hate this government. I am grateful for my brother’s life. I am grateful to have living parents, parents who can afford to rescue us in times like this. I am grateful that I didn’t have to be the one to go seek Fola out from that den alone where I’d have also been molested. I look in the rear-view mirror, with my flooded eyes, at my dad who is driving. I can’t describe what I see. My dad is so hurt and I can only imagine how many buckets my momma has cried in that car behind us.
I want to do more now. I want to say that I will do anything to prevent this from happening to me and my loved ones ever again. I don’t even want to hear that it happened to a stranger. But the truth is that you never know, with the way this country is run.
These men must go. SARS must end.
I’m sitting in this rocking chair, in the corner of Fola’s room. It’s been three weeks since that night. Fola seems to be getting back to his old self, we all are, actually. At least, we can now laugh at the speed with which I flew into daddy’s room to hand him that call, that evening. There’s something we say where I come from and it’s that with time, a bad story becomes a joke. I’m aware though, that it would not be so funny now, if that day had ended differently.
We talked about it…
He was slapped across the face countless times because he refused to unlock his phone. He was kicked and shoved into their stinking van. They had threatened to kill him- that no one would know and that even if any body found out, nobody would do anything to them. One of them had even cocked his gun and aimed at my brother’s face. They probably didn’t extort him on the spot because they figured that taking him in would pay them more. He described what the cell looked and smelt like too, but I’d rather not say.
SARS is a unit of the Nigerian police force that was created as a response to crimes bordering around robbery, motor-vehicle theft, kidnapping, cattle theft and firearm possession. But, they have metamorphosed into a cult that since its creation in 1992, has become infamous for laying ambushes all over the country, harassing the citizens- especially the youth- profiling people based on their looks, and apparent financial status, kidnapping, maiming and killing people. They go after anyone who dresses nicely, rides a car, has returned from places like the US, uses an iphone or a laptop or just smells good. These days, they are recruited without any formal training. Any hoodlum can pay his way in and be given a legalized AK-47.
People have narrated the most outrageous stories of human-rights abuse at the hands of these officers. There have been reports of men and women, boys and girls who have disappeared with no trace, even until right now as I write this. Hundreds of thousands of people are missing and many more have had their freedom taken away unjustly, their lives going to waste as they languish in prisons all over the country- sometimes, unknown to their friends and family.
Every Nigerian knows someone who has been stopped on the road by SARS and worse still, some non-Nigerians who visit the country have their own tales of woe. Families are forced to live either with the pain of loss or the pain of not knowing and not getting any closure.
