SYLVESTER OROMONI: TOO LATE TO DIE IN VAIN

Today, I return to my December 6, 2021 interview on Arise TV where I was confronted with the question: can you assure us that the death of Sylvester Oromomi will not be in vain.

In our launch broadcast of December 19, 2021, I posited that one of the drivers of our #NOPROTECTIONNOSCHOOL campaign is to immortalise Sylvester Oromomi’s by ensuring that we disable the enabling environment for the reoccurrence of such bizarre but avoidable deaths of our precious children with the school system.

Today, I think my thinking has shifted a bit. While our campaign goes on and the reasoning behind it is valid and true, permit me to declare today that once the blood of a human being is unjustly shed like Sylvester Oromomi’s it is too late for it to be in vain. When the blood of the nation’s future, which our precious children represent is shed, the nation has just cut its own veins and it begins to bleed from there and if urgent attention is not paid to stopping the blood, the nation bleeds to death; the death of seared consciences, ossified sense of humanity, from whom the milk of compassion is completely drained. This death is fed by the elixir of impunity and corruption like we see being celebrated in our dying society today.

The Nigerian nation has cut its veins in multiple places and it is bleeding, yet nobody pays attention because it seems to be standing. The blood of our precious children being shed within and outside the school system is speaking and crying for justice and will not be pacified by any cunningly devised fables, diversionary propaganda, chicanery, and cants, sponsored by the Nigerian state, its cohorts and cronies in the public and private domains and men, women, and institutions, which their gross negligence and misgovernance have enabled.

I make bold to say today that whether we commit ourselves to the cause of Justice for our eliminated but precious children, their blood speaks and the more it speaks the more we bleed, the more we bleed the more we die and the more we die, the more we risk extinction. John Donne penned down this instructive truism 400 years ago: ‘no man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main…any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind. And therefore, never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.’

It is therefore in our best and preservative self-interest to speak up for the Sylvester Oromomi and other precious children, who have been murdered by the Nigerian State and under its watch and seek to disable the enabling environment for deliberately created or permitted for abusing our precious children and sending them to avoidable and early graves.

We invite you to lend a voice to the #NOPROTECTIONNOSCHOOL Campaign today, beginning with reposting this piece and to gain CLARITY, please check out and share our campaign declaration here https://youtu.be/d3SR1ydXoac. Do have an INSPIRED day.

I am Taiwo AKINLAMI
S.A.F.E®️ for Children ETHICIST