ADIEU MISS GRACE USHANG

When the news broke on sunday September 27th that a youth corper, Miss Grace Ushang from Cross River State serving her mandatory national one year service to her fatherland was raped and murdered in Maiduguri, i grieved.I imagined what she went through before life was finally snuffed out of her. Oh! what pain, what torment, what horror that the young lady was subjected to. Why would anyone kill another man because of religion or dress code? WHY?
I remember in 1987 the horror that almost happened when we finished from the NYSC camp in Zaria and had to stop by in Kaduna township to see my cousin and his family. I did not know he stayed at Badarawa village, a slump withn the city. Our friends took us to Kaduna and we ( my friend from school and the camp) highlighted at a nearby busstop and took a cab to the village. In fact my cousin stayed just at the boundary between the village and civilisation. In that hot afternoon in August 1987, the children had just closed from the schools around and were going home. We saw some mallams pushing carts of water containers and selling sugar canes in wheel barrows but we moved on hoping to get into the main street to ask for direction to my cousin's house. Just before we crossed the large gutter to step into the main street, the children acted as if on cue, bent and picked stones to throw at us. We were shocked and momentarily froze at one spot. Here were young ladies like Grace Ushang on National assignment from the southern part of the country in the Northern region being surrounded by children with stones and some had started throwing stones because we were wearing NYSC khaki trousers. Unfortunately the few hausa words we had picked from the language classes in the camp, did not help. God intervened. Two of the teachers in one of the schools just passed by and saw the scene unfolding so they quickly came down from their motorbikes and started shouting 'MAKARANTA NE, MAKARANTA NE'. Like a scene in one of Nigeria's Nollywood homevideos, the crowd that had gathered started dispersing slowly and relunctantly. The men apologised but we were so grateful to be alive that we almost knelt in the stagnant filty gutter to show our appreciation to the teachers for saving us from untimely death. That experience, that nightmare is still fresh as i am writing this.
Ours was a threat and we are alive to say it but the poor Miss Ushang is not alive to narrate her experience. What a shame. What an unfortunate but avoidable tragedy. Why would an agency send innocent people to areas that are prone to crisis and religious intolerance. Why waste a young girls' life so suddenly and wickedly?. Why must the ladies be sent to a remote and sometimes rural areas where there is no civilization for national assignment. Is it a must that Nigeria must be one? In all this, the innocent ones are the one paying the price for our leaders insensitivity.
May GRACE USHANG soul rest in perfect peace and may those criminals that carried out the dastardly act be apprehended by God and the police.