Survivor.

Bello has just been released from the detention of the task force operatives guarding the Ajegunle axis. It has been nothing more than two days of horrendous torture meted out by the brutes in uniforms.
Mama aboy was kind enough to talk to the superintendent of the Ajegunle division who let him go, but not without inflicting bruises all over his body.
Prior to his arrest, he earned a living from riding his tricycle, which has now been confiscated by the taskforce operatives. They only obeyed the orders of the state government.
His spirit is deterred, it has been dampened so many times but something hit different about this. It is the despondency, the crude reality, and the blackout at the end of the tunnel.
Bereft of his next action, he meditates on the hopelessness and obscurity, whilst standing in the middle of the road, hands akimbo.
Amidst all this, road users jeered at him, making condescending remarks and bigotry slurs.
He can hear them brazenly yell
“Aboki!” “Adamu!” “Boko haram”
The seemingly silent ones give him the death stare.
He cusses under his breath, at his parents for having him.
He wonders if God exists, if he listens or at least intends to intervene in his difficult life.
As he trudges off the road, his mind flashes back to that cold Saturday morning that he watched helplessly as his world crashed.
It was a chill Saturday morning in a small village in Borno. The air was frigid as the morning dew settled on the earth. It seemed Nature was at war with Gwiza. The remote community was in a constant battle with environmental disasters.
The previous year, it was a flood. The river had overflown its banks and absorbed the farmlands, alongside their crops.
However, that day, it was a sandstorm. The winds roared and dragged along with it everything within that perimeter; the clothes on the ropes, chaff from geru, shoes, etc.
People scampered like greased lightning, lest their properties are lost forever.
Little did they know that the real storm was coming.
Shortly after the sandstorm episode, Adamu called out for help.
His voice thundered so loudly that it shook the entire village. Adamu was the vigilante leader and the only surviving one in the team. The other members of the team had been slaughtered the previous week.
His call was the 9th or 10th call for help in one week.
News of people being maimed and killed in their farms spread like wildfire. The perpetrators were described as unidentified armed men, ruthless, ferocious, and stern-looking.
They infiltrated the village, ravaged their farms, raped women before the destruction of properties.
Then it all started — arson.
Their houses were set ablaze by these beasts. One after the other, mothers called out to their children.
Shrill cries of infants were heard. People dispersed to seek shelter as everyone fled.
Bello’s sister Amina grabbed him by his left hand and they ran off.
They had barely run a kilometer when he remembered that their mother had gone into the hut to breastfeed their baby sister.
Amina urged him to run to the mosque and join their other sister — Farida, which he did, hesitantly.
Amina’s voice still rings in his head. He hears her distraught voice in his sleep. Sometimes, her ghost haunts him.
He regrets letting her attempt to rescue their mother because they both never came back.
Bello had stopped by the mosque to inform Farida of the calamity that had befallen their once peaceful home. It had become a bedrock of violence.
They had no home to return to, Gwiza had fallen.
He would never forget the lorry that dropped them off at Kano.
He still recalls the hoarse voices of the men who took turns to climb Farida till she stopped breathing forever.
He dreaded joining the almajiri (homeless) children, but that was the first chance of survival in Kano. They roamed the streets and fed off food remnants from strangers.
Whenever he blinks, he sees silhouettes of the men who made him swallow tablets of tramadol.
He gulped bottles of codeine till he became weak and unconscious, then they did to him what they had done to Farida.
Back then, Lagos seemed like hope. It was the final destination.
It was far from the bitter memories that life forced on him.
Lagos was the light at the end of the tunnel.
Six years later, he finds out that it was all a mirage because Lagos turned its back on Bello.
Life has thrown its worst at him: no life, no family, nothing to live for.
Nigeria has taught Bello that it doesn’t pay to be upright.
In such a short period on earth, he understood that pain is living, so he decided that it is time to give what he has received — pain.
Bello sniffles, and embarks on a journey back to the North.
It is time to go home, Boko haram is recruiting.