EHIME MBANO MASSACRE: THE HYPOCRITICAL SILENCE OF IMO PEOPLE, ESPECIALLY THE OPPOSITION POLITICAL CLASS
Yesterday, Imo people woke up to a very gory and disturbing story that emerged through a social media circulated video of the unprovoked massacre of about 8 military personnels and two of their vehicles burnt to ashes by yet to be identified assailants along the Aba Branch Road in Ehime Mbano.
A friend who resides in Aba Branch where the incident took place confirmed that the military men where moving innocently along that road when suddenly they were ambushed from the nearby forest and massacred, their vehicles burnt and their guns and bullets carted away.
In the usual manner of Imo People, just a very few persons have used their individual social media platforms to condemn the killing or sympathize with the families of the slain security operatives. As though the security operatives that were murdered are not human beings and are not innocent enough to deserve to live.
Painfully, within the political class, especially the opposition parties whose campaign slogan has been to provide a safe Imo with zero incidence of crimes, criminality and mindless killings, not a single one of them has spoken against this senseless and unprovoked murder of security operatives.
Instead these politicians have deployed their various media agents and radio presenters to begin to make insinuations and create negative narratives to serve their political purposes. No recourse to the lives of these security operatives, no call on the government to expedite actions to bring to book the persons directly and indirectly responsible for this mindless murder.
Likewise the silence from the common imo people and their call insinuating that all youths in Ehime Mbano are innocent as such any military raid or arrest done in Ehime Mbano in the bid to get the culprits will amount to the arrest of innocent youths is very unfortunate and hypocritical to say the least.
This hypocritical silence is a subtle way Imo people give credence and impetus to insecurity in the state. This hypocritical silence usually come when the victims of the killings are security operatives not civilians as though the blood of a civilian is more precious than the blood of a security operative.
Instead of Imo people to lend their voices through their individual social media pages and walls, through radio phone in and other means against this gruesome, unprovoked and mindless murder, they rather choose to go dumb, surreptitiously discouraging moves to investigate and arrest the killers and recover the guns they stole, because that is the main aim of the killing; to cart away with their guns, and bullets which will be used to perpetuate insecurity in the state and the neighboring southeast states.
True to the words of Moliere "Hypocrisy is a fashionable vice, and all fashionable vices pass for virtue". Imo people especially the political class from the opposition have adopted for themselves a fashionable vice that would make them pass for people of virtue.
What a people !
Unegbu, Onyedikachi Victor (Wallace)