I remember back in 2000, I was just a kid in Kaduna. A woman in a black veil came in the dead of the night to warn my father that they were coming for us Igbos. We and another Igbo neighbor had to use a ladder to climb over to the neighbors compound at the back of our house.

We escaped certain death that day because of that Hajiya. My mom is a nurse and had probably treated her or her family a while back.

A few days later, after OBJ had sent tanks to secure Kaduna, we returned home to see our house in a proper mess. Ransacked and all.

As long as I live, I will never forget the dead bodies on the streets, in the gutters. Especially that of a pregnant woman, her stomach torn and bloody.

I will never forget my uncle Kalu, a jovial pastor who was butchered and left for dead in his church. He survived.

With terrible scars all over his body. He now stays in Sokoto with his family, still a preacher.

I remember mummy Evelyn crying and wailing in our sitting room, because they found her daughter dead in the streets.

I remember uncle Norbert from my mom’s village.

One time, he wore a kaftan and dressed up like a Muslim to go get something for us, I think food or water. He came back breatheless, apparently he was almost lynched by a mob, when someone noticed how weird his Hausa sounded.

No one knows how, but he got a sword.

Some days later he snuck in, in the night with a bloodied sword. Apparently, he had Murdered someone. I remember my father’s outrage, the shouting and blows my father Rained on him.

I remember Anuty Chinwe crying in our parlour because they had killed her brother.

I remember Benjamin, with his now forgotten Edo surname. My best friend in Primary school who just up and disappeared.

I discovered years later from his aunt, a family friend. That his entire family were wiped out simply because they were southerners.... Nyamiri.

I have many more first hand experiences of the massacre and subjugation of the igbos.

Let’s leave out the civil war, I wasn’t born then. Someone else can tell that story.

So, I am not surprised at the silence of the privileged people who think the igbos are always lamenting.

People who think @elrufai and @hadizel son @b_elrufai comments on gang raping an Igbo woman is not such a big deal. I bet he had uncles and family friends who have regaled him with tales of the Igbo men they killed and the Igbo women they raped, while they made Igbo sounds.

Bello is simply trying to relive stories he’s heard as a kid. It also says a lot about his parents and their level of ethnic tolerance.

I don’t even want to go into the gender issues. In a saner country, the outrage alone would cause @hadizel to tender an unreserved apology.

But no, we have been distracted. A man is fired for reporting the truth in ‘strong’ language, while Bello and his learned mom roam free. Unashamed, unapologetic and smug.

I ask, Is there any justice in this world? Who will pay for the blood of my slain Igbo brothers? Who?

I don’t hate Hausas or anyone of northern extraction. My father would knock me silly from the grave if I ever utter any ethnic slur.

I’m sharing my experience for perspective on the struggles of the Igbo and southerners in the north and why some Igbos are uncontrollably angry.

It’s been almost 20 years, but I still have vivid nightmares, where I try to scale that fence in the dead of the night with my family to escape the machete of men in white robes screaming ‘Allahu Akbar’!

Surprisingly, all these has also made me extremely curious.

I have a Quran, and I’m learning Hausa.

I have also been working on a novel these past 3 years about an almajiri, who becomes a jihadist under Boko Haram.

Maybe, I can show the world their own side of the story. The conditioning and indoctrination that shapes that mentality.

While we are sharing our opinions, let me drop some poems I wrote about this beautiful country called Nigeria. The ancient mother of my unborn son. It’s in two parts. I call this one. ‘Black Giant’.

Here’s another I have titled ‘Content Lots’.

Okay, one last one, I call this ‘The Wrath of Rot’.