LITTLE ENDS: Condolences to...

...the families, friends, and kinsmen of the seventy Nigerians who perished last week in an accident on the Okene-Auchi-Benin road.

May the bereaved have the fortitude to bear their terrible losses without expecting such empathetic moves as would have come their way were they all to be citizens of a responsible state.

When you lose seventy Americans in gory circumstances that could be attributed to the demission of the state, the American president immediately abandons whatever he is doing to release a statement.

In Nigeria, such gestures only happen when the life in question belongs to the member of a lootocratic family. Remember President Yar'Adua's uncharacteristic break-neck speed to value the life of Saminu Turaki?

It may take the same man a week or more to even be "briefed" by Olusegun Adeniyi about the loss of seventy lives on his Federal roads.

May the bereaved have the generosity of spirit to forgive Chief Tony Anenih. He it was who spent hundreds of billions of naira to ensure that all the potholes, gullies, and craters on our roads are adequately maintained.

Now his work has claimed seventy of his kinsmen. And to the departed: may you forgive us for being a people who never remember.

There will be no monuments, not even a tree planted. Once the wreckage of that bus is cleared, we move on. If you do come back to these realms and elect Nigeria, may we have progressed beyond that Stone Age when roads are repaired with the crocodile tears of a minister... just before she is transferred to another place of service to shed more tears. ...the families, friends, and kinsmen of the over two hundred dead in Oporoza, Kokodiagbene, and Okarankoko villages in Warri South West Local Government Area of Delta State.

President Yar'Adua deployed two fighter jets to mop up things because he suspected your villages of being "militant enclaves".

He is not new to this thing. You see, he had earlier target-practiced with the village of Agge in Bayelsa state.

And in the Handbook on the Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Middle Belt and the Niger Delta by the Nigerian State, which he found in the State House library, Mr. Yar'Adua stumbled on the auspicious antecedents called Umuechem, Odi, and and Zaki Biam.

In essence, if Ibrahim Babangida and Olusegun Obasanjo got away with wiping out entire Nigerian villages and have so far not been bungled to The Hague to face charges of crimes against humanity as they eminently deserve, Yar'Adua knows he has nothing to fear when he retires to Katsina in 2015 as the founder of post-modern Nigeria.

So, he improved on the strategies of his predecessors. Where Babangida and Obasanjo had gotten the job done with jackboots and AK-47s, Yar'Adua deployed the Nigerian Air Force to rain bombs on Nigerian Villages in a ‘democracy'! In their graves, Foday Sankoh, Farah Aideed, and Jonas Savimbi must be blaming God for not having created them Nigerians and given them the opportunity to rule that country.

Imagine being able to do all the things they did in Sierra Leone, Somalia, and Angola and still get the chance to retire as multi-billionaires, stakeholders, and fathers of the largest party in Africa! ... the families, friends, and kinsmen of the ten Nigerians who perished last week when the tussle over the 'Aidonogie' stool in South Ibie clan in Etsako West Local Government area of Edo State took a bloody turn.

Although no chieftaincy tool is worth a human life, the recourse to intra-communal butchering at the drop of a hat is a reflection of a society that has lost the culture of life - while remaining one of the most incompetent handlers of death in the world.

Human life means nothing to the state and the necrophilic party (PDP) in charge and an ethos of wasteful deaths has been firmly enthroned. Nigerian newspapers talk about ‘mass burials' and ‘mass graves' with a casualness that would shock the ordinary man in the streets of Baghdad, Kabul, or Gaza.

Often, you have to re-read to make sure they are talking about Nigeria and not some war-torn, basket-case country. It's a game of mirrors.

A state that does not value life produces a citizenry that does not value life, the one reflects the other in a perpetual imagery of death. ... the millions of ordinary Nigerians, at home and abroad, who have to endure these traumatic headlines. Daily.

A patch of their sanity and humanity goes with every life our system wastes. Condolences!