24 hours with the devil!!!

Chapter 3

When one lived in a country where terrorism, k********g and banditry where the order of the day, one couldn’t help but suspect the authorities. “If terrorism lasts more than 24 hours, the government is involved”. This was probably the most popular quote of the most brutal Military Head of State Nigeria ever saw, General Sani Abacha. Nigerians were a persevering people, but their spirits had been crushed to the extent of fighting only to survive, nothing more. No more room for patriotism. And it was for this reason that one could say that Jei was a strange man, good but strange. And Gaza was an even stranger man, and arguably better than Jei, at least where matters of intellect where concerned. But it wasn’t entirely strange that these two men had decided to take up the responsibility of being patriots because it was broken, society. And in society, people panicked by doing nothing. And while men of their age focused on settling down and building a survival, they decided to spend the singular longest period of their lives not for themselves. And things like this required that you cut off ties with whatever could be used as a weakness to bring you down, take you out.

When the military was involved in a government topple, one would call it a coup d’état. When civilians were involved, it was called a revolution.

But Gaza preferred to call it a coup de’volution for reasons best known to him. Gaza and Jei were the kind of men that God retired making anymore, and this was because they were men who would die for any kind of people, under the right circumstances. And while Jei was a man of emotion and mystery, Gaza was a man of logic and solitude. This was why it was agreed that for change to come into being, chaos must be invited. It was with this theme that they set the entire state of Kaduna ablaze, two men, as two ravaging lions, who went about hunting down, and devouring any public officer that had preyed on the masses. It was done all in one night. A night of blood and death. They both knew the consequences of this, that sooner or later death would come asking. And they both were ready to give him their answer when he arrived, that he came too late abeg! But this manhunt, was something that even the gods on their best day wouldn’t see coming. And by the time the authorities could grasp what was going on, they already had a pile of potbellies and bloodstained kaftans on their hands. And even worse, they had to wait for dawn, because Nigeria wasn’t the sort of country where one just moved in the middle of the night anymore. People were desperate, and the night was a desperate man’s best cloak. At least the people who committed these crimes had the dignity to not want to have their faces seen. Not to support evil though, but the people preferred it that way, because when the darkness was unveiled into light, people were more shattered by the person, than the act.

One could say Jei was good. And Gaza was a more intelligent man, but men with hearts like Jei simply didn’t exist anymore. This was why one could call him strange.