The legendary Fulani leader, Uthman Dan Fodio, described conscience as an open wound which only the truth can heal.Conscience is so powerful that it can never leave and can never be exorcised. No amount of prayers or palliatives can kill ones conscience.If anyone succeeds to silence conscience, it is only always for a while, and takes a lot of work. And it always comes back, perhaps stronger.The only thing that conscience is unable to do, which I would have loved to see, is to talk, to tell the story of its host.Last weekend, I passed through Osogbo, the Osun State capital, on my way to Ada, the only town in the state of the living spring with a standard golf course.As we got to Osogbo, we saw a guy running. Initially, he was running with a slow pace but on looking back and discovering that he was being pursued by a man in mufti, he increased his speed. It turned out that the man pursuing him was a policeman who suspected him to be a yahooyahoo boy. His accomplice was arrested before he escaped.As we watched the drama, fellow passengers began to make comments. Even the driver made a call and he was alerting the person on the other end to the fact that policemen were after yahooyahoo boys.The passenger sitting by the driver made a laughable justification of the yahooyahoo craze.According to him, the police should leave the boys alone because all they were doing was to take back what the oyinbos took from our forebears.The oyinbos, he said, cheated cocoa farmers by using wrong scales to pay them for cocoa pods. He added that in some cases they even exchanged cocoa pods for cutlasses.So, in his view, the yahoo boys are simply repatriating what should have accrued to their forebears. Almost everybody in the bus agreed with him.His comment reminded me of an encounter my brother once recounted to me. A mother took his son to church for prayers. For days, according to the mother, the boy had been having nightmare.Someone was after his life. Like a true mother, she wanted him fortified with prayers. At a point, the pastor asked what his profession was; the boy kept mute.After some hesitation, the mother spoke: The job our children do these days. The pastor first assumed she was talking about music, but he later realised that the woman was talking about yahooyahoo.Who knows one of his victims might have died as a result of the money lost to him' I thought. And the ghost was after his life. Will you blame the ghost'The attitude of many of us to advanced fee fraud makes me feel our conscience is dead. Many of the victims are people who lose their life savings because they were scammed with promises of love and marriage and the prospects of buying non-existing goods.Our attitude to fraud, especially when the victims are foreigners, makes me wish our conscience will talk.What will the conscience of a woman who has two or three children for a man other than her husband say' What will the conscience of a yahoo boy say' What will the conscience of a killer say' Does the conscience of someone derailing jump on a piece of information to tilt their thoughts towards confessing and turning a new leaf' Does conscience drill into one of those times that a yahoo boy attends church and unearth a statement:The truth shall set you free'Read Also:Buhari promises more support for EFCC, othersIt will also be interesting to find out the content of the conscience of publishers who owe backlog of salaries and still expect reporters to work miracle. What about policemen who should arrest criminals for the purpose of prosecuting them but do so only to collect bribe'It will be interesting to find out the contents of a killers conscience. Does it prick him' Some weeks ago, a female politician was killed in Kogi State.The late Mrs. Salome Acheju Abuh, a 60-year-old mother of three men and one woman, was killed in her home in Ochadamu, Ofu Local Government Area of Kogi State. Before her death, she was a resident of Abuja.At her polling unit on the governorship election day, a suspected political thug was said to have marched to where she was seated, dealt her a heavy slap and kicked the chair from under her.Her husband rushed her to the hospital. When she recovered, he asked that they returned to their base. She opted out.As the Woman Leader of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) in the area, she was said to have been optimistic that her party would upstage Governor Yahaya Bello. She did not like to miss the moment.The police announced the arrest of six persons in connection with the crime barely 24 hours after President Muhammadu Buhari directed security agencies to fish out the killers.A first cousin to the deceased, Mrs. Ruth Acheme, said the sponsors of her killers were spreading rumours to cover up.Speaking withThe Nationin Lokoja, Mrs. Acheme said her cousins remains were burnt to near ashes, and that they were only able to retrieve a part of her burnt skull, which they packed in readiness for her internment today.She said: They claim that some of the louts were from Ibaji. The husband (also a retiree from the Presidency) pressured her that they should go to Abuja together on Sunday, but she persisted, saying PDP would win the election and she wanted to be on the ground.Even her younger sister called from Ajaka and said: What are you doing there' But, she said, If you people are afraid, she was not afraid of anything. She was killed that day and her body burnt.They came inside and packed her belongings and loaded them into their Sienna bus and another smaller car. One of her younger brothers came from Ogwalawo, but he was advised to go to the police station. It was after that we went with the police.The police passed by us to other houses that were burnt; five in all, belonging to PDP members. The member of the House of Representatives came to inspect the crime scene, he met us under the cashew tree where we stood, and together, we went to the house. There was little of the head and chest, they packed the whole thing in a cloth.My final take: I will kill to hear the killers conscience talk. If only our conscience has the ability to talk without us having the power to stop it, killers will be afraid, fraudsters will be terrified and criminals generally will be apprehensive and, most likely, tow a different path.
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