When you are in the land the LORD your God is giving you, someone may be found murdered in a field, and you don’t know who committed the murder. In such a case, your elders and judges must measure the distance from the site of the crime to the nearby towns. When the nearest town has been determined, that town’s elders must select from the herd a young cow that has never been trained or yoked to a plow.
“The elders of the town must wash their hands over the young cow whose neck was broken. Then they must say, ‘Our hands did not shed this person’s blood, nor did we see it happen. (Deuteronomy 21:1-3, 6-7 NLT)
On the 8th of June, 2018, Uganda lost one of its historical freedom fighters and legislators (MP Arua Municipality) Col. Abiriga Ibrahim. He was murdered together with his bodyguard brother. It was a shame to all of us. God loves sinners and hates sin and it is due to the love and patience of God that some sinners get away with what they have done, but the murderers of Abiriga will not be protected and if the government has failed on other murders, those who killed Abiriga will be captured soon. (Take this as a Prophecy).
Not because Abiriga’s life was more precious than the life of others but because it was Abiriga. A good old man who had no real problem with those he didn’t agree with and one who rendered an elderly service to his camp. If the murderers attacked him because he supported the Age Amendment Bill, then we all can conclude that Abiriga isn’t the best person to attack.
Abiriga was old, sick (Diabetes) and no future influence at all on matters of national importance. No wonder the President concluded that the slaying of Abiriga was SENSELESS and those who did it were IDIOTS. If the assassins intended to send a message to the incumbent then to murder Abiriga was not a message to the incumbent but to us the citizens that whoever did it, hates even the innocent, helpless and vulnerable people.
To kill Abiriga is to tell all of us (who have sides) that if you love something (be it wrong or right) you deserve to be killed. All of us as citizens must condemn this and rebuke this act despite our afore feelings about the late and current affiliations.
Like some of the high profile murders Uganda has suffered, Hon. Abiriga was assassinated on a Friday by people riding on bodabodas (motorcycles), just like Afande Kawesa was murdered on a Friday and by people riding on a bodabodas. I don’t know and I don’t want to guess why these people are being murdered. I am only interested in the HOMICIDE investigation. Am not focusing on the police or the authorities but on we the citizens. Did you notice that every time someone is murdered, there are EYE WITNESSES (at least who tell us that the killers were on motorcycles).
What these witnesses do not tell us is what they did about it. All they say is that we called the police but the police took long. In fact, in the case of Abiriga, the residents said, they had seen these strangers and none called the police until the strangers had messed up things. After these strangers have taken down one of us, we get to know how careless we were in the first place.
The book of Deuteronomy in that passage above teaches us the importance of social responsibility in case of any homicide. When someone died in your neighbourhood, and you all couldn’t tell who murdered the victim, you had to contribute a heifer and all of you gathered to repent and ask for forgiveness from God lest he held all citizens accountable.
I have seen bodabodas chasing cars that have hurt one of them for miles. Not once have these shooters been pursued after they assassinate a person. Someone is about to ask me: Pastor, can you run after such armored murderers? Well, my answer to this is that, if am sure others will come after me, Yes I can.
Many of us do not do the right thing because we know in doing the right thing we might be left alone on the course. Because the Jews knew the cost of having a homicide in their community without the culprits being apprehended, they were very careful with crime. Criminology was not left in the hands of the authority but in each and everyone’s concern in the neighborhood. The entire community gathered and confessed: ‘Our hands did not shed this person’s blood, nor did we see it happen’.
Look at this confession: it doesn’t matter whether YOU DID IT or not. It also matters that YOU SAW IT HAPPEN or BEING DONE but did nothing or less than you could do. What is happening in your neighborhood? What are you doing about it? Since it was a Member of Parliament murdered let me share with you what one Member of Parliament once said:
That’s the short version, attributed to Burke. A longer version reads as follows:
Whilst men are linked together, they easily and speedily communicate the alarm of any evil design. They are enabled to fathom it with common counsel, and to oppose it with united strength. Whereas, when they lie dispersed, without concert, order, or discipline, communication is uncertain, counsel difficult, and resistance impracticable.
Where men are not acquainted with each other’s principles, nor experienced in each other’s talents, nor at all practised in their mutual habitudes and dispositions by joint efforts in business; no personal confidence, no friendship, no common interest, subsisting among them; it is evidently impossible that they can act a public part with uniformity, perseverance, or efficacy.
In a connection, the most inconsiderable man, by adding to the weight of the whole, has his value, and his use; out of it, the greatest talents are wholly unserviceable to the public. No man, who is not inflamed by vain-glory into enthusiasm, can flatter himself that his single, unsupported, desultory, unsystematic endeavours, are of power to defeat the subtle designs and united cabals of ambitious citizens.
When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall, one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle. The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.
–Edmund Burke, Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents 82-83 (1770) in: Select Works of Edmund Burke, vol. 1, p. 146 (Liberty Fund ed. 1999).
I can’ say more, God bless you as you do something about it, I invoke TRUTH REASON and FAITH
Pr. ITM WHITE
The Gospel Hawker
iTiS Well of Worship Ministries (John 4:24)
iTiS Well of Worship Fellowship (John 4:24) 