RECLAIMING HUMANITY

Besides binging on my favorite local dishes! This Summer has been an insightful and adventurous one! From snorkeling in the Indian Ocean to quad-biking in the Arabian Desert (bucket list thangs)! But, my most significant moment is the time I spent at Amnesty International, Nigeria developing the Freedom of Expression communique that will hopefully be incorporated into the Constitution someday. This experience defined PURPOSE to me in simple but salient terms, a perspective I haven’t really explored in a while. I had the opportunity of interacting with people whose seemingly little efforts made positive changes beyond their immediate surrounding. The idea of having abundant resources to make the lives of others better is a fallacy! Because the truth is that with abundant resources comes abundant responsibility that will make even the most passionate of us lose heart for a single cause if not earlier conceived. However, the story doesn’t stop here because “the prove of success is the victory over failure”, so it is only naïve to think that setbacks are unnatural when striving for a phenomenal aim.

As the mantra goes “too much of information is bad” #TMI (lol kidding… that was entirely me! :D), but not in this case because the experiences I am about to share, reignited my courage to find my voice. On the fateful day, I was returning from a fun dinner in Lagos when our car was stopped by a police officer who immediately corked his gun for whatever intimidating reason! Everyone in the car introduced themselves with the driver showing the requested documents. The officer further asked for the tint permit of the car which was shown to him digitally with the application ID because the physical copy was yet to be collected (we know how “efficient” mail services are in Nigeria!). Next thing I knew was the officer raising his voice without really saying anything and harassing everyone! Like in a mirage, I put my phone on record (evidence must be preserved… ya dig!) then I stepped out of the car to get a detailed explanation of why we had to be subjected to such indignity! This is also reminiscent of the time I was stopped by cops in California for inadvertently driving with my full headlamps on and was subjected to interrogation for over ten minutes even after I identified myself and destination beyond reasonable apprehension!

At each point in time I was not thinking of the likely scenario of being shot by the officers for daring to speak up because I knew that either way, I was already in harms way by finding myself in that scenario, so I might as well exercise my right to freedom of expression as a human being and a citizen while at it! Too often we have allowed infringement on our basic rights go on for too long out of fear of retaliation forgetting that DOING NOTHING was what brought us here in the first place! Daily innocent citizens, especially youths in Nigeria, and minority groups in the United States are harassed by law enforcement without any repercussions despite the plethora of laws enacted to protect every citizens’ basic rights. This goes beyond a ridicule to our justice systems to the enchainment of our humanity! The time is now for us to reclaim the human race as a single unit from its captors!