Today is my POP(Passing out parade) and it starts by 8 but the good lord knows I'm not leaving this place till 9. If you've noticed I've not been uploading a lot of posts on my blog, here's why.

Like 2 months ago I published a story titled "Kaduna military men want to kill me', twas about my life being in danger and telling people that if nobody heard from me they should know I've been captured by the military, and in Less than 24 hours after publishing that story I was captured by the military and 'imprisoned' and got the shit beaten out of me.

How it all started: a female student of mine in the school i teach claimed to be abducted and raped by 4 military personnel and I decided to investigate the case with the aim to publish so that justice would be served. After a series of interviews and investigative journalism I wrote the story and published it on Bella naija. I guess the oga of the military men in Nigeria saw this and dismissed the four soldiers who raped the babe and that was how wahala started. The head of the barracks where the rape happened traced me to the school I taught and brought 7 hefty soldiers to the school. Luckily I wasn't around, twas a Wednesday and I went for cds(cds is an nysc thingy) so I got a call from the staff of the school saying soldiers are looking for me and they say if I don't return to the school within the hour they would scatter everywhere and blablabla. Twas on my way back to the school i wrote that article about me not being safe.

So I got to the village and I was told the soldiers were in the house of the king. I and the corpers went there and met the soldiers. They asked me why I wrote the story and sha yabbed me. They went through my phone and made me delete the story off Bella naija but the problem was that other bloggers had also copied and pasted the story so basically over 50 sites had it and that pissed the soldiers off. Then they forced me to send a mail to their oga saying the story was a lie and they made me apologise. After all the threats and making me do stuff they told me I had to follow them to a police station to write a statement. The king of the village and principal were against the idea but when military men give an order who are you to argue. So they took me and another male Corper who volunteered to tag along so that they wouldn't kill me and concoct one bullshit story.

We got to the police station and the whole story changed. They made me write a statement saying I hate the military and I cooked up the story to defame them and the girl wasn't raped. They even went as far to tell me to write that I was bedfriending the girl but I put my foot down and insisted that I wouldn't write such. Anyways after making me write the false statement they put me and the other corper in their car and said they were taking us back to the village. Next thing I know we are entering their barracks. I first wanted to ask wtf we were doing in their barracks but I wasn't in the mood to chop slap, so I kept queit. All of them left the car leaving only me and the other Corper. For like three hours we were in the car and then the head of the barracks asked us if we wanted to charge our phones and we said yes so he took our phones to charge, that was where we fucked up. Next thing I know he's telling one chubby military man to take me and the other corper somewhere, we followed and the military man takes us to the barrack prison and tells us to enter. 

That was when i started to spark, I started shouting saying I wasn't going to enter saying I didn't do anything wrong and i'm a corper and my father is a blablabla and I was going to blablabla. The other Corper entered but I refused. I guess my noise attracted other soldiers and from nowhere I saw upto 30 young soldiers running towards my side shouting 'That's the bastard who made them dismiss our colleages'. On my own I quickly entered the cell and begged the military man to close the gate. For hours these soldiers tried to open the gate and they finally did, they dragged me out and beat the shit out of me. If you think you've ever been beaten by a military I can bet yours wasn't half as bad as mine. First of all they were beating me out of hatred and not out of bullying like they do to other people, also they knew beating me was wrong so they even said "Make we beat am so that mark no go show and dem no go know say we touch am". And truly they beat me and there was no mark except a busted lip and an eye injury (till date I still see flashes of white light passing my eyes, initially I thought I was seeing ghosts or maybe God was calling me but when I went to the doctor they said its because of my eye injury). Anyways after beating me they offered me food and I declined. My only consolation was that I didn't cry or beg as they beat me.

As I laid in the cell to pass the night I was just thinking about my life, about how Ope, a whole graduate is sleeping in a military cell and his only offence was reporting rape. The next morning I was woken to do what the military men call "Fatigue". After doing some minor drills I was told to cut grass for 3 hours. Somehow the head of nysc found out about what happened and called the oga of the military men to immediately release me, the nysc staff of the village I was serving came to pick me up. They took me to the village and told I and all the other corpers to pack our stuff and leave because while we were leaving many military men were threatening to kill us and they felt it wasn't safe for us to remain in the village. They told us that from that moment till we passed out we were not obligated to work and we could do whatever we wanted but we had to remain in Kaduna but not the village. So happily I left the village and started my touring around Nigeria.

After we left the village I had to meet some top nysc officials to narrate what happened, they called the military men and threatened to revenge. I don't know what happened but a few days later the military men called me to apologise and begged me to return to the village and blablabla, I recorded the call thinking they were going to threaten me. Anyways the case is still pending with nysc as they hope to get back their pound of flesh and I hope that as I go for my POP in a few minutes they give me my discharge certificate cuz lord knows I might get an extention. 

BTW trauma actually exists. I normally hear white people say that something happened to them and it traumatised them. After being beaten for writing a story about the military I was traumatised and I became scared to write thus my inability to publish stories on my blog.