Prey or Predator.

Esuun Tyoyima

The laws of life are simple.

You are either prey or predator.

I was born as prey but I knew at an early age that I didn’t want to die as prey.

I cocked the gun and squinted my eye into the scope as I waited for the perfect moment to shoot.

The little voice of reason I had long learned to ignore tried to plead with me, but I pushed it away.

I had come too far to back away now. 

One didn’t have a conscience if they really wanted to achieve something, it was the only thing this country had taught me.

Conscience is for the weak, the oppressed…the prey.

I remember watching the rich kids, the politician’s children growing up. We were the same anatomically but other than that, we could have been an entirely different species.

As I stared down at the politician smiling at the crowd, anger gripped my heart as my mother’s face flashed in my head.

The sad smile of defeat on her face just seconds before the doctor had stepped into the room and told us her kidney transplant wouldn’t be possible because the kidney had suddenly gone missing.

I remember looking at the doctor as though he was speaking another language because what other possible way could I explain the gibberish which had just left his lips.

I was about to start screaming hell down but my mother’s grunt made me pause and I turned to her.

She gave me that sad smile again, that smile which haunted me two days after when I returned to the hospital and was informed she had passed away in her sleep while the local news celebrated as Governor Sani’s first son had just gotten a kidney transplant performed by the best doctors in St. Jude’s Hospital…the same hospital my mother had died in because the kidney had suddenly gone missing.

As I waited for Governor Sani to finish making promises he had no intentions of fulfilling to the indigenes of Lagos state, I wondered if my mother had given me that sad smile because she understood that she was prey.

“My people!” Governor Sani’s voice rose through the speakers.

“Oh my people!” The ignorant youths responded and it was in that precise moment when the governor smiled widely, displaying his gap tooth, that I pulled the trigger.

Screams erupted as the governor collapsed to the floor and the entire grounds became a flutter of panic and movement.

I knew the instant the soldiers sighted me on the rooftop but rather than run, I fell back on the floor and let out a crazed chuckle.

It didn’t matter when the soldiers appeared on the roof and beat me to a pulp before they dragged me down the roof and out of the building.

“Why the werey de smile?” One of the soldiers asked but they would never understand that just for a second on that roof I had been the predator and I had reduced a man so high, to my prey.