The recent barbaric killing of four youngsters (students of the University of Port Harcourt)at their impressionable age by residents of Umuokiri, Aluu in Ikwerre Local Government Area of Rivers State, is a clear evidence that evil is on the prowl. Some have called it “jungle justice” but that is if the murderous deed will ever be proved to be just. Only last week, news of another vicious killing of one Mercy Peters, a student of Auchi Polytechnic, hit the air waves. Mercy was reportedly abducted, raped, murdered and buried in a shallow grave by fellow students.

Few months back the media was awash with the story of some alleged cult boys at the Abia State University,  who repeatedly and in turns raped a female student of the same institution (their fellow student), recorded the abhorable act  electronically and posted same on the internet. Not long after, the nation was also stunned by the sordid story of Cynthia Osokogu, a 21-year old student of Nnamdi Azikiwe University, who was invited to Lagos by her ‘face’ no ‘craze book’ friends, who actually turned out to be her enemies. They robbed Cynthia, raped her, before torturing her to death.

Indeed, with this potpourri of lurid evil, we relive the Otokoto saga of some years back, when an 11-year old boy, Ikechukwu (Godspower) Okonkwo, was beheaded in Owerri, but ironically by someone called Innocent Ekeanyanwu. Ikechukwu’s body was buried in a vertical grave dug right inside the premises of a popular hotel. Thinking they could permanently erase any trace, the angels of darkness planted a banana tree over Ikechukwu’s grave.  The discovery instigated a violent convulsion of unprecedented proportion in the quiet city. It was one of the early signs that our society has gone bananas and that evil has overtaken and submerged ‘good’.

Evil now selects characters and colours. It was isolated and differentiated from good. Evil was an absurdity. A time was, when society rendered evil impotent and lame, and treated it with derision, like leprosy, so that while doses of local anesthesia were shot at it, people distanced themselves from the contagion.

Truly, time has changed. Evil has undergone a metamorphosis and shed its dirty uniform. It now dresses in a cloak of the absolute and comes to table with beakers and smokes cigarettes. Evil is now a sound from a distant clime.  It no longer exists for one who is not a victim. The resonance of evil is now an edifying music for the evil doer. So, he hums as he concocts and sprinkles more evil on his unsuspecting victims.

Really, as it has been said, every era gets its own share of  suitable evil. From the last decade of the 20th century, our society has been sorting out different styles of malignity.

These days, however, evil has been changing its priorities, its targets and its cast of characters. Otherwise, how could a band of gun-totting men storm a students’ hostel, identify and murder 20 at one fell swoop? How could gun men invade a church where some faithful were communing with their creator and massacre them in cold blood? Why are young men, filled with energy and vitality, increasingly getting convinced of spiritual El Dorado in some heavenly plane, if they strapped a bomb on their body, drove into a church and blew everyone up including themselves? How could we explain a situation whereby students sent to school to acquire knowledge would abandon their books, take up arms and begin to kill other students and terrorise the neighbourhood in the name of cultism? Why should a four –year old child, in such age of innocence be abducted, incarcerated, traumatised and permanently left with the gory memory of forceful separation from his parents?

Why should a man abandon lucrative motor spare parts business and choose to trade on human parts, from which he hopes to make fortunes and train his children?

Why would one who claims to be a prophet of God, describe little children as witches and chop off their fingers? What is there in the skeleton of a man buried ten years earlier that his own son would exhume and sell, if there is still something called evil? Questions! Endless questions!

This catalogue of ferociousness only goes to show how much evil has lost its definition, how much pervasive fascination evil has acquired in our own environment and how flamboyant evil has become. And I ask, are we under a satanic spell? Could we have been wasting resources building a society of brutes and savages, creating a modern day Sodom and Gomorra, beating hollow drums for a macabre dance or blowing the trumpet of tragedy for a man sentenced and being led to the gaol?

Perhaps we have come to the crossroads where the land mines of fate lie in ambush. The dogs of war are still asleep, but our bones are being crushed inside our boots. The diabolic machination of the evil-doer has conquered our bile. We describe others as evil to justify further evil against them. We pour venom on our closest neighbours, on our brothers and sisters, even on our children without blinking an eye. Obviously evil has become as infectious as it is atrocious. But when evil ceases to be evil and men eat dung then dogs should eat shame.

Desmond Osueke