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Tuesday 26, July 2005, was the day a bullet skidded off the top of my head and shattered the windshield in front of me, after it had sailed in from the back of the bus and barely grazed three other passengers.
We were coming from an SPE session at Port Harcourt, AKS-bound through the Aba route. It was 11.25 pm, and we’d just abandoned the right side of the road for the left to avoid the potholes when a spatter of gunfire greeted us. Instantly everyone crouched and the driver, usually an irrepressibly dull fellow, slammed on the accelerator with uncharacteristic alertness and launched the vehicle through the ambush like a bat out of hell. The entire time I heard myself yelling, “Move!!! Move!!!” Even when I felt a sliver of heat streak over my head from behind, I didn’t stop yelling…
Out of harm’s way, we assessed the damage. Two bullets had impacted the Plexiglas behind. While one had apparently fallen through harmlessly, the other had cut through the bus, splicing a boy’s right eyelid, leaving a furrow on another’s cheek and grazing between a lucky chap’s fingers. But the deadly harbinger was hardly finished. Wordlessly someone pointed at my head. I reached up, felt something warm and wet. I pulled back and stared at my bloodstained fingers, puzzled. Then my gaze turned to the windshield, notched by a single bullet hole, and at that moment the explanation hit me: before it had made for the great outdoors, the slug had cleaved a ridge on the back of my head while I’d sat cowered during the ambush, drawing blood but leaving barely a scratch. A closer examination revealed another bullet lodged in the back of one of the front seats – my seat. It was clear now that this slug, not the one through the windshield, was the source of the other three boys’ injuries who were huddled together in the seats behind me. Death had missed us all by a hairsbreadth…
Shortly after, we encountered a company of policemen at a checkpoint and soon enough, we were led to their Esiama station, where they held us till 4.00 am. I’d tell you about how the police had at first made themselves scarce for fear that we were robbers, or about the bus packing up on the way home, or the swashbuckling way we edged through the Eleme gridlock earlier that day, but this near-death experience took the cake…
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Manny Maurice
Manny Maurice is a youth activist and Vice President of the Future Leaders Network, Nigeria. Also a petroleum engineering graduate, he enjoys penning down commentaries on burning socio-political questions, and runs a blog of his opinions at http://thepayzone.blogspot.com.
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