Ruminations: If Only The Emperor Had Known … By Agba Jalingo

Agency Report

You locked me up in jail for the first time for six months for doing nothing to you.

You put me on a three years trial for horrible crimes like terrorism, treasonable felony, cultism, and an attempt to overthrow the government.

My younger brother, Agbibia, who worked with me, died while you incarcerated me and I was never allowed to even see his body before burial.

CrossRiverWatch office was surrounded and destroyed by your security agents who shot tear gas canisters on our faces.

You arrested my two editors and colleagues, Jonathan Ugbal and Jeremiah Archibong, and put them too on trial for two years for doing nothing.

Our work In the CrossRiverWatch office cannot go on as calibrated because of incessant surveillance by your security goons and the threat to the lives of my staff.

You stopped me from building my house in Obudu and called it a boys quarters. Annexed my property and turned it into a truck yard. That house would have been standing beautifully by now.

Again, you arrested me a second time and three others and got us thoroughly beaten up on June 12 the following year. We were all blindfolded. Our hands were tied to the back and stripped to our pants with a poisonous substance sprayed into our noses, for no offense other than coming out to mark June 12 in Calabar.

My wife and daughter have remained almost permanently on the edge because of constant monitoring by strange faces on her business premises; making her afraid of going to work.

And now your empty-headed brother who is living on stolen money and his baby lawyer wife who cannot write a simple examination that everyone else writes, have the courage to come and surround my house with policemen and take me to lock up in a dungeon in Abuja.

But you know what, you want to come to Bedia my village, and campaign for votes ba? What will you be telling my community when you arrive? That you are a troubler of their beloved son? What project will you point to in Bedia that you have done?

I am not angry because all unmerited suffering is redemptive. But I am a student of history. I won’t forget. You are already paying for your sins while I am reaping from my travails. There is nothing again you do that you will get right until you propitiate for your injustice.

Retire, go home and ask God for forgiveness. Yet you seek to embarrass yourself wanting another position. Pray and pray hard that the day your adversities commence as they surely will when they shall enter your home through the ceiling, when you will be on your knees seeking help when not many will take your calls again, it is this same person you did all these to that thou shalt call, pray I shall answer thee.

As for your buffonic brother and baby lawyer, they are not far off from the pit they dug for themselves.

But if only the emperor had known, he would have chosen a different path.

Yours sincerely.

Citizen Agba Jalingo is the Publisher of CrossRiverWatch and a rights activist, a Cross Riverian, and writes in from Lagos.