Hapless Cynthia: Window-dressing murder

The murder of pretty Cynthia Osukogwu, the daughter of a retired Major General, Frank Osokogwu, in FESTAC has brought to the fore how low this society has sunk in recent years.

And by this, I'm not even referring to the increasing worthlessness of lives in Nigeria of late. I'm talking about what seems to be a tendency to rationalise some of these gruesome murders by a section of the public.

It has been shocking to see the sort of comments flippantly made by some members of the public since the story of the missing girl was circulated frantically on the social media by her worried relatives.

While the family members were desperately begging for clues about Cynthia’s whereabouts, some were dismissing the case as that of a runaway lover girl. And even when the tragic news of her death hit the airwaves, many again took the callous route of dismissing her as a runs girl who got her just desert.

As appalling as these sort of comments are many people did not see anything wrong in them, and most people just waved them off and moved on. This is alarming, and calls our collective humanity into question.

Ironically, some of the people who passed the most callous statements on this case are Christians or Moslems. Indeed they condemned her using the codes of behaviour prescribed by these two faiths, which they believed the girl had flouted, even without knowing her.

The question to ask these people are: Does anything make murder right? Even if we assume she was a runs girl, did she deserve to die a violent death? Do her parents deserve to lose her in such a horrendous manner?

We owe a responsibility to ourselves to speak up when people exhibit this sort of shocking callousness.

There is the tendency to see these cases at a distance since it is happening to someone else. But the truth is, in a society, an evil done to one is done to all.

May God console the bereaved.