The victim, Mrs Joy Alozie and the victim’s counsel, Barrister Silas Udoh.
Saturday, April 16, 2011, will remain evergreen to Mrs Joy Alozie, a 45-year-old school proprietress. It was the day the 2011 presidential election was held in Nigeria. Sadly, it was also the day post-election violence broke out in some states in the North. At the end of the orgy, no fewer than 800 Nigerians, among whom were some members of the National Youth Service Corps (NYSC) of southern Nigeria origin observing their one year mandatory service in the North, have brutally killed and property estimated at several millions of naira destroyed.
Mrs Alozie and her family, who were resident in Bauchi State, were some of the victims of the violence. Nigerian Tribune gathered that while she and her daughter escaped death by the whiskers from the rampaging arsonists and murderers that stormed their house that day, the fate of her middle-aged husband, Sunday Alozie, a father of four, is shrouded in mystery as he has not been seen over a month after the carnage.
Mrs Alozie, a school proprietress and a grocery shop owner, lost her businesses to the arsonists’ fiery protests. Her family house was also torched by the hoodlums.
Sadly, that was not the first time she and her family had been made victims of the bloodletting and sheer destruction in the North by some youths. In an interview with the Nigerian Tribune at the weekend in Lagos, she related how in 2006, she lost her school, Happy Home Nursery and Primary School, to ethno-religious rioters, who razed the building. But with the help of friends and relatives, she said she was able to put resources together and set up another school, unfortunately in 2009, another riot broke out and her school with over 100 pupils, was again, destroyed in Bauchi.
“I lost one of my teachers and a parent, who attempted to help put out the fire. I thought I had lived long enough in Bauchi State to be seen as part of the people, but it is sad that they don’t accept other tribes and religions in their midst,” she said.
According to her, “I started living in Bauchi as a spinster in 1992, I got married and had all my four children in Bauchi. I can speak Hausa language fluently but it is sad that an adage the indigenes of Bauchi propagate is true, that ‘no matter how long a chicken lives with his master, when the master wants to slaughter it for ceremonies, he does not hesitate.’ That adage now has meaning to me,” she said tearfully.
Mrs. Alozie narrated how she escaped from the hoodlums and arsonists who stormed her house that fateful day. “After the election, news started filtering into town that President Jonathan was leading. All of a sudden, we saw youths in their dozens marching towards our house, we sensed danger. So, my husband, I and our two children, who were with us at that time, had to run for our lives. We ran in different directions, we saw the youth with cutlasses and other dangerous weapons, we saw our house and my grocery shop go up in flame. They were looking around for us but we had hidden ourselves under a culvert, where we stayed till the following day.”
She said she escaped with her daughter to Kano State from where they later got transportation to Lagos State. The whereabouts of her husband is still unknown.
“We slept in the cold, under the culvert that night. I was only wearing a wrapper round my waist. We did not have any cash, we saw a military van but we were afraid to come out. The following day, we saw a bus rescuing some people to the South-Western states, we hopped in, they dropped us in Kano State. But because of fear of another attack in Kano, I quickly went to my relatives’ house in Kano. They gave me clothes to wear and money to go to Lagos. That was how we came to Lagos,” she said amidst sobbing.
Mrs Alozie and her daughter are currently residing with Grace Achums, a House of Representative candidate in Akwa-Ibom State in the last general election.
Mrs Achum said the crisis took a heavy toll on Mrs Alozie.
“She arrived my house that day looking half dead. She was not herself at all, we had to stabilise her and take her to the hospital to ensure she was fine with her daughter, but she kept calling her husband. She was hysterical and was in shock,” Mrs Achums said.
She later contacted a human rights lawyer to take up Mrs. Alozie’s case.
The lawyer, Silas Udoh, a solicitor and advocate of the Supreme Court of Nigeria, said his chambers had written a petition to the government.
“I took her case on humanitarian grounds, this woman has not been herself and luckily her son has contacted her but her husband is still missing. Our chambers wrote a petition to the Abia State government and the federal government to search for the husband and to fully compensate her.
This is a woman promoting the unity of the country with her family, they did not do anything wrong to have lived in the North because the constitution supports freedom of movement and settlement in any part of the country. So, this woman has not done anything wrong. We are calling on the government to fully compensate her for her loss, give scholarship to the children and most importantly find her missing husband. We will fight for her and other such victims of post-election violence until the government fully compensates them,” Udoh said.
Written by Adelowo Oladipo Tuesday, 24 May 2011
Source : tribune.com.ng
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