GIVE A CHANCE AT PEACE by Adebayo Caleb

It is 7am on the clock that stands on our mantelpiece and I am watching the morning news. I count them-eight countries experiencing war at the same time  in Africa and the middle East alone. To think that the guns solve nothing. Soon, I am only staring at the Television, not hearing the words the newsman gallantly reads off some screen. My mind travels back in time to explore a period where war ravaged my own country-Nigeria.

The Biafra war, as it is popularly called, held memories for me; memories I never wished to revive. It was a civil war that tore my country apart. The people who had lived together for years had turned suddenly to fight each other. This war tore me up emotionally, as I no longer knew home. As a very young boy, I knew what it was to feel the pangs of hunger eating at your belly and you have nothing to help it. I knew what it was to see young children die in cold blood and young girls raped. I knew what it meant to run and hide in thorn-filled bushes to sleep out in the cold. The war taught me what no child should grow up with.

I still see images of cold blooded killings in my sleep, thoseM16’s and machine guns tearing at bodies right in front of my eyes. For them, the war has long been over. For me, it replays like a VCR.

As I sat here, beads of tears form at my cornea and are soon flowing freely down my face as I remember the lines of a poem I once wrote ‘What about peace? , our sacred golden piece. Our peace has been moved, our shelters disrupted.’

True to it, the wars, the guns with their booming sounds, the fighter jets and bombs never solve anything.

One party finally surrendered in the Biafra civil war in my country, yet many had died; a line had been crossed that could never be restored.

That is what happens in wars; people die, enmity is hardened, hunger and illness are rampant and even the innocent are somehow involved in this trauma simply because our peace has been moved- because someone prefers guns to peaceful resolutions.

My country never remained the same after the war. Our economy suffered a downstream, our environment was dead; a wasteland, our education system had been torn apart, our families disjointed. It was like waking up from a nightmare into another nightmare. This is all that wars have to offer. So I ask ‘What about Peace?’ Why have we forgotten about the only answer to a sustainable environment and community? Why have we chosen to love the lie that arms are the answer?

Who has disrupted our shelters? Who has moved our peace? I am not telling us to bury the hatchet because when we do so, we can always dig it up again, I am telling us to get rid of the hatchet and embrace peace.