Yes but No

I received with mixed feelings the news of the death verdicts passed on Major Al Mustapha  [Chief security Officer to the now late dictator Gen. Sani Abacha] and a certain former employee of the Abiola family who had helped facilitate the crime

The men who are said to be responsible for the murder of the June 12 heroine Alhaja Kudirat Abiola: The assassinated wife of the also now late Bashorun M.K.O Abiola the self acclaimed winner of the infamously annulled presidential elections under the IBB regime which held on June 12, 1993

Major Al Mustapha has been in custody for longer than many people care to remember and had somewhat escaped a verdict for so long up until yesterday in Lagos,Nigeria , where and when he was condemned to die by HANGING by a Judge who painstakingly read her verdict describing him as a monster and his accomplice a Judas who had helped the killers successfully gun down his employers' wife.

I remember the gruesomeness, the horror and the shock of the killing
The images on every national daily that showed blood splattered in the car she was shot dead in
I can only but imagine the pain and the anguish that her family must have suffered to have had their matriarch cut down in her prime as she fought gallantly and ultimately died for the mandate she was convinced her husband won at the hands of a soulless dark bespectacled General

Major Al Mustapha was really an errand boy and an equally soulless one at that if he is indeed guilty of the crimes he is accused of [I am not alluding to the notion that maybe he has been falsely accused instead I am treading carefully choosing to understand that only God knows the truth in all situations and no matter how much man thinks, his sight or capacity to execute fair judgement in its purest form would always be skewed by his humanity and its limitations]. As I went through a couple of tweets after the verdict was read, people began to ask valid questions about the higher placed powers that must have been accomplices to the crime and who would likely never be found out and for whom Mustapha would suffice as a scapegoat. He could never have planned that dastardly act in isolation, but he must now suffer alone: the reality of the world is that we are always alone when push comes to shove more often than not.

That said...

I celebrate the doggedness of the wheels of justice that have slowly but surely turned granting "Justice" to the pained ones.

I applaud a judge who hasn't been intimidated into cowardice by the very glaring reality that this could be potentially misinterpreted as gender and  tribal inspired vengeance by a fellow woman of the same tribal extraction as the slain Kudirat: this is a tribe that is more often than not at loggerheads with the Northern Hausa tribe from which Al Mustapha hails [Much of the South really is in the same scenario having a very strained  lackluster relationship with the North born of out of years of religious motivated genocide]

I commend a family that must have given up and yet held on albeit by a strand of hope that some day they will be avenged and that day has come finally

I however always find it difficult when a life is taken so I have struggled a bit with the verdict but I will keep my sentiments out of this and instead say what I vehemently find appalling is the method of death prescribed by our fair Judge

HANGING!!!
Forgive me but that's antiquated, totally outdated and absolutely inhumane

I expect the counter argument to be that why offer a soulless monster a humane exit out of this world, especially as he didn't offer the slain freedom fighter any such favors when he ordered that her body be pumped full of lead bullets till life gasped out of her
And then I would say, in taking life: any life in a manner as monstrous as has been recommended don't we reduce ourselves to his revolting, barbaric, debased and depraved state?
We become him just with the law on our side.

If his due is rightfully death, let us bid him farewell from this side of the divide as the humans with a soul that I know we are and offer him in death what he failed to give to his victims in life : Mercy