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HOW MUCH LAST?

Location: Musa Slaughter, Agbor, Delta State.
Woman 1: How much last? (flips meat over)
Seller: cow head cost well well. Just buy ordinary meat, take this one for 5000.

(A conversation between a meat seller and a buyer. Beef is one of the most common meat types in Nigeria. Maybe not expensive when it is cut up in chunks but believe me, it is worth a lot, whole)

So how did we get here? The food chain places humans above cows. We eat the cows, we shit them. Our shit sometimes finds it way to the bushes, the grasses, the vegetation, and another cow eats the grass. They eat nothing special, nothing extra spiced and prepared with love, we do. So how did we get here? A whole cow costs about 60,000 to 150,000 naira depending on size. How much am I worth? If I was placed on a table, for sale, how much would you buy me?
Probably for nothing! Because that is what the human life is worth in Nigeria, in Plateau at least. Plateau state is at war, a war it never consented to.
Do you know why heartbreaks are painful? It is because of the sharp realization that the other party does not share the same emotional carelessness that you do, by emotional carelessness, I mean love.
Do you know why this war is painful? Wars are always painful, but do you know why this war is especially painful? It is because Plateau never asked for it. It never consented to it. It never expected it. It does not deserve it!
How do you fight a war with the bare hands you used to make breakfast for your child? For your child whose blood now fertilises the soil for green grasses? Green grasses which shall be eaten by cows? Cows which he once ate but cannot anymore because he is gone? Gone because nobody cares! Nobody cares because he is nothing but a mere statistic and sometimes an absent figure in the news.
Fifty died, we are told five died. A hundred died, we are told ten died. Yes, we know the maths you do, we know the percentaging of fatalities that happens in order to keep your country beautiful looking to those on the outside.
How much last? How much am I worth last? Shall I get the burial I deserve when my life is cut short in the middle of the night by men who my government may never know, or perhaps, pretend not to know? Shall my mother ever use her hands again to draw my ears when I err? Or will they only be used to draw her wrapper to her face, wipe her tears, when she remembers that I am gone, and I have no grave, because I was killed and set ablaze. Till my ashes were no more.

How much last? How much am I worth last? If I am worth anything, then maybe my death would be the last, the last of a mass slaughter perpetrated by the enemy of an unknown man, who thinks, my blood is the ignition  to the execution of his plans.

How much are the lives of those in Plateau worth? And why is nobody 'buying' them?

In memory of those who lost their lives, may lose their lives in the ongoing madness in Plateau state. 

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