by Abubakar Adam Ibrahim

What can we do for you, daughters of loss? Our outrage is inane. We will rant, and make demands that those monsters with big guns will ignore, and our government too will ignore, or threaten us with a seven-year jail term for saying this is not right, for demanding that things should be made right.

Dear sisters,

My thoughts are with you, the 20 abducted girls of Borno, daughters of the absent country. I wish I could reassure you that your country will not rest until you are found and your abductors are brought to justice, but that would be a lie. Your country will pray for you, that is a certainty, waiting for angels to come rescue you. That will most likely not happen so you will be forgotten, like the abducted daughters of Yelwan Shendam who spent years in slavery, in the heart of this country, in this age, being raped and bearing children for the men who killed their husbands and sons. And the government denied such barbarism was happening under its watch when we all knew.

What can we do for you, daughters of loss? Our outrage is inane. We will rant, and make demands that those monsters with big guns will ignore, and our government too will ignore, or threaten us with a seven-year jail term for saying this is not right, for demanding that things should be made right.

In the final analysis, sisters, you are a minor inconvenience to our overlords. You are getting in the way of the looting and cavorting and posturing for the next elections, and our government knows it’s priorities. You are not it. Your lives, beautiful and promising as they are, are not it.

In the final analysis, we, the children of this blighted realm, are even more lost, imploding with our outrage that will do you know good, that will not prevent the perpetuation of such savagery being done in the name of God. Don’t ask me what God, sisters, for they say it is the same God you serve, the one who made you and lovingly breathed life into you. That God. The ways of men confound me, I tell you.

I have no consolation for you, sisters, I have no reassuring words. And this rant is just another expression of my impotent rage. Just another inconsequential voice in the cacophony of your loss.
Eternally baffled

Abubakar.

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Abubakar Adam Ibrahim is a 2013 Gabriel Garcia Marquez Fellow.
Author of The Whispering Trees (short stories). He tweets from @Abubakr_khalifa and blogs at www.moonchild09.wordpress.com

Op-ed pieces and contributions are the opinions of the writers only and do not represent the opinions of Y!/YNaija.