Requiem for the rapper, By Odi Ikpeazu

I must confess I never heard of the dearly departed young rapper before now but I was pained by news of his untimely death.

In the exact same way, I would be pained at the premature departure of any youngster, be they a celebrity or a street monger. Just to put myself in their father’s place would kill me. And can a woman’s tender care ever cease toward the child she bore?

Someone asked me what I thought of the entire rollercoaster trailing the sad incident but that is where I get lost. Fortunately or unfortunately, I am not in a position to form any opinion because I have no forensic or empirical information, with which to build logical foundation for any supposition.

I am certainly never inclined towards making the fickle, irascible and impressionable social media my sounding board, neither am I an enthusiastic commuter on the frequent bandwagons of mass emotion.

Goodness knows the succession of bandwagons that I have let pass by me at the station even as I waited impatiently for a wagon to my destination

I see the Biafra wagon chugging regularly by, the Yoruba Nation wagon, the EndSars wagon, the Obidient wagon and several others, on which I would see strange and familiar faces, some waving, some beckoning for me to get on board.

What I observe is that many people are so keen on a Revolution that they jump at any chance to achieve even the least approximation of it. But for me, real revolutions are more cerebral than physical, more thinking than anger and less a product of frustration than reason. That is why so much prior thought goes into the principles of revolutions, that the instigators are often compelled to write it down painstakingly in published books.

Mao Tse Tung’s ‘Little Red Book’ was a guideline of the Chinese Revolution, as was Moammar Ghadaffi’s ‘Little Green Book’. Frantz Fanon’s ‘Wretched Of The Earth’ was a road map for the black revolution, as were the volumes published by the prolific Kwame Nkrumah concerning the Pan African revolution. Even the hideous Adolf Hitler had the presence of mind to author the rambling ‘Mein Kampf’ in promotion of the Aryan supremacist revolution.

There are many musicians on the current wagon, based on which some pals think I should hitch a ride. But I am a lawyer too and even in school, one of my favorite subjects was Evidence.

A judicial quote that I have never forgotten since back then was that of the legendary English judge, Lord Denning. He declared that in reaching judicial decisions, the judge is almost helplessly dependent on facts, being the pegs upon which the overcoats of evidence are hung. Opinions, feelings, suspicions or hunches, in the absence of cold facts may mislead one into wrong or hasty conclusions.

Even ‘similar facts’, being a pattern of behaviour that supports an allegation that a particular event likely occurred on the basis that the accused has engaged in similar behaviours in the past, is rarely admitted in criminal trials though it may be sometimes helpful.

Therefore, in establishing murder, a proximate motive, an autopsy and a smoking gun are more persuasive than anger, exasperation and high emotion.

-Ikpeazu a lawyer and pan-Africanist wrote from Abia State