A few days ago, we drove on the Benin-Ore expressway. Five corpses lay by my side of the road. Five! This is not stories I heard, not statistics I read. These were bodies my own eyes counted, most of them headless, thrown on the expressway like a heap of refuse, left for vultures the way one abandons the carcass of a dead rat on a rubbish heap. I ask, and I demand an answer; who does this? Who takes a human being; someone’s son, someone’s father, someone’s Iya or Baba and discard them on our federal highway with such casual, practiced cruelty? What manner of heart plans a killing and then plans, with equal care, the disposal knowing full well that no police detail will cordon that stretch of road, no coroner will examine what’s left, no file will ever be opened?

It is not only that Nigerians are being slaughtered on our roads. It is that the slaughter has been priced correctly by its perpetrators. Priced at zero cost, zero consequence, zero pursuit. Ẹni tí kò bẹ̀rù ìjìyà, ó ń dẹ́ṣẹ̀láìdúró, he who fears no punishment sins without ceasing. Impunity is not the absence of law; it is the presence of a state that has signaled, through years of inaction, that certain lives and certain roads do not fall under its watch. The Benin-Ore corridor has for years been synonymous with kidnapping, banditry, and unexplained killings. A notoriety so old it has calcified into a kind of grim folklore. Travelers exchange warnings about it the way one warns of a cursed river. Who is dumping the headless on our roads? I will not pretend to a certainty the evidence does not give me. I did not witness the killings, only their aftermath, and I refuse to hand out names as though outrage were proof. But I will say this without hesitation: whoever they are, they act with the confidence of men who have learned, correctly, that Nigeria does not investigate its dead unless the dead have a name attached to power. A headless corpse on Benin-Ore is not identified, not autopsied, not avenged. It becomes vulture-food and a statistic nobody compiles.

This is what impunity looks like when it has matured. The killers do not flee in panic, instead, they dump with the unhurried efficiency of men clearing debris. That unhurriedness is the most damning evidence of all; it tells you they have done this before, and expect to do it again, because the road from crime to consequence in this country has been deliberately left unpaved. I condemn the killing, the mutilation, the disposal, and above all the silence that follows it. A nation that permits its highways to become open graves has surrendered something more than security; it has surrendered the basic premise that a citizen’s life is worth investigating. Òkú tí a kò sin, ẹ̀mí rẹ̀ kò lè balẹ̀, an unburied corpse cannot rest, and neither should our conscience. Until we treat a headless body on a federal road with dignity and respect, we will keep driving past our own dead, counting them the way one counts potholes, expected, unexamined, and endlessly renewed.

Bamidele #BeninOreExpressway #ImpunityInNigeria #SecurityFailure