Prison experience
The fifteen days I spent in Kirikiri seemed much shorter because of certain events. One which I will not want to forget was my first Sunday in the prison, when a preacher came to preach to all the prisoners, saying “God has a reason for your being here.”
Ewele shouted, “Nonsense! I did not do anything; those who did are drinking tea somewhere”. However, Ewele was not alone in that thinking. I probably did not shout as much as Ewele, but I expressed my disagreement with the pastor fairly audibly thus:
I saved the lives of my men
I saved the lives of my people
I saved the honour of my nation
Tell me what also the will of God is!
The preacher calmed us down and continued. He gave us an example of an earthquake somewhere in the Caribbean that killed everybody except thenwrongly accused prisoner on death row who was in fact to be hanged that very day. Everybody else including the governor of that island died except this prisoner. To me, all these were nonsense until the story of federal troops river crossing disaster at Asaba came in. I shouted, “Those were some of my troops! I would have been there.”
Ifijeh came back and talked to me some more. Then the pastor prayed for us, and told me about Hebrew 10 vs. 35-36 again. It was then that I wept, remembering that I could have been there too, drowned in the Niger River, had I not been at Kirikiri prison.
extracted from page 103 of 707 of The Tragedy of Victory by Godwin Alabi-Isama