by Ahanonu Kingsley

It is with a heavy heart, so bleeding and wrecking, that I write. It is with a sense of loss, so high and so extensive, that I chose to comment on this heartbreaking incidence. Indeed, it’s with a great feeling of grief and of heavy emotions that I write this sad note.

It’s a note strewn and centred on the shrieking and shocking loss to death’s cruel and cold hand, of Miss Oladepo Amoke.

Late Amoke Oladepo was a graduate of the Ladoke Akintola Univesity of Technology (LAUTECH), Ogbomoso. She happened to be among the recently conscripted young graduates, who are fulfilling the demands of the one-year national service; she was posted to Kano State.

The newly posted corp member was reported to have died on camp from an ailment that became fatal as a result of negligence, flippancy, ineptitude and horrendous disregard to obvious threat to her life.

Amoke, ignored for implied pretense, was let to be slowly and heavily and silently dragged down into oblivion by the shrapnel of death that hovered around her.

The stealthy robber came, strongly and unannounced, bestriding the girl in the usual slow yet continuous form of an ailment. The people around and who were supposedly her guardians never saw this coming- they were not supposed to know, she alone knew how and where it strung her.

But-and this is where it provoked condemnation- when she did reveal her imminent hound, she was blatantly dismissed. Her revelation was merely waved away.

The demise of Ifedolapo Amoke is very unfortunate and so devastating, and so dastardly- having come chiefly from the avoidable negligence of some people. It succinctly smacks of grave irresponsiveness and irresponsibility on the part of the NYSC camp officials- the people in whose care she was.

It is such a tumbling loss, a cringing story of greatly tragic episode, for the great hopes she presented and was yet to achieve as a lighting star.

Going through her brief bio that I’ve been availed of, I discovered how an asset she had proved to be, not just to her family and immediate community but to the Nigerian future. A scholar per excellence, a child of brains. She was a beauty to behold, a great factor in a nation saddled to be driven by youthful dexterity and excellence.

Amoke’s sudden death, and while in active service to fatherland, is one event so sad and very condemnable, having found hook on the untold negligence and crass insensitivity of the officials of the Kano State National Youth Service Corps, where she had been posted.

The very NYSC officials under whose momentary care the young lady was, without sounding ambiguous, aided the young Oladepo’s marauding assailant of death to cut short her promising life journey.

The NYSC camp officials in Kano State, by their utter negligence to respond urgently even when it was obvious the supposed pretense was indeed not what it was alleged, are to blame for this unfortunate and condemnable loss.

Thanks and no thanks at all, the death of Amoke, though grievous, has exposed the pitiable states our young school leavers are kept in some of the orientation camps. It has exposed the nonchalance, highhandedness and the crudity of some of the officials on the various NYSC camps, who treat these our young graduates with disdain and callousness. Such are the evil champs on camps under whose watch the helpless ‘youth corper’ is kept.

Such are the ones whose acts of ineptitude caused Miss Oladepo’s life. Such are the ones that have given unimaginable sorrow to the Oladepo’s household as food. Such are the ones that have stoked this writer’s bile and fanned many more emotions.

Verily, such must be sanctioned to foster strong deterrence, to teach the very lesson to camp managers, all over, of how important it is to treat the young ‘corper’ with respect.

More than a statement, the death of Oladepo Amoke is painful and must not be swept under the grass, especially when the accomplices to it are known. I pray for solace and fortitude on all who cherished and miss her presence.