By Reuben Buhari
When Mr Haruna Gajere set out to attain the burial of his cousin in the village, he never thought he will return in a wheelchair. Two years later after the burial, Gajere, paralyzed from the chest down, consequence of a 21-gun salute that ended tragically, has been moving from hospital to hospital while toying with the idea of suicide writes Reuben Buhari.
As a 33-year-old happily-married banker of many years, Mr Haruna Gajere, with a beautiful wife and two children, like every other human out there had robust plans for the future; plans that include concluding a rewarding career within the banking halls and retiring peacefully into farming later in life.
However, an unjustifiable twist of fate in the form of a freak accident has now confined Gajere to a wheelchair for the last two years. His fault was to be by the graveside of his deceased cousin, a mobile policeman who was being saluted with the traditional 21-gun salute. After the policemen were through discharging their guns, Gajere, some few meters away from the grave side, was found lying on the ground in a pool of his own blood, arising from the bullets of one of the policemen.
It started on 27 January, 2013 when Gajere who was then working with a new generation bank in Kaduna, decided to go home to the village for the burial of a cousin – a mobile policeman who had died in Lagos. Before that faithful day, Gajere was actively involved in making plans to accord his deceased cousin a befitting burial, and on the date of the burial, he finally made his way to Yarbung village in Kachia local government of Kaduna state. Devoid of any clairvoyance hint of a life changing incidents that awaits him, Gajere left for the village early on a Saturday morning. However, the burial couldn’t take place that Saturday because the police contingent that accompanied the corpse arrived in the village very late. So the burial was shifted to Sunday morning.
On Sunday morning, the burial proper commenced. The shoes, the cap and the belt of the deceased were laid on the coffin and the policemen who were to give the final customary salute to a fallen comrade in the form of a 21-gun salute took position some meters away from the freshly-dug grave that was crowded with sympathizers – both relatives and those who were there out of curiosity.
The policemen then raised their guns and with the muzzle of their AK 47s pointing into the sky, released some volleys of bullets into the sky. However, one of them had a malfunction. His gun jammed and it didn’t discharge. With a bewildered look on his face, he lowered the gun and kept trying to rectify it. Against standard precautionary measure adopted by most security men with arms, he didn’t put his gun on safety mode. Gajere, meanwhile was some meters away helping those mixing the cement that would be used in plastering the grave after the coffin had been lowered into the hole. He was just in the process of adding water to the already mixed cement and graveled when his world exploded.
The policeman with the jammed gun was still lowering his gun and trying to fix it when the gun started emitting bullets into the crowd. Gajere while still bending at the waist to pour the water was shot in the shoulder. The bullet went straight through his chest, missing his heart by inches and hit his thoracic spine. Unknown to him, three of the 12 vertebrae that made up the thoracic spine got damaged immediately. Three other people around the grave also got shot. One had a bullet through his leg while another got a bullet in the back. Luckily for them, theirs weren’t life threatening.
He was rushed to Ahmadu Bello University teaching hospital Shika in Zaria where MRI and CT scan done on him confirmed that apart from the spinal cord injury, he also had three fractured ribs. The bullet stayed there for nine days before he finally had the first spinal cord decompression surgery. After that, he stayed in the hospital for five months and his hope that he could stand and walk again got dashed when he couldn’t. He became paralysed from the chest to his legs feeling no sensation when touched. He couldn’t excrete on his own and started passing urine with the help of a catheter. A full bustling 33 year-old reduced to a wheel chair when he temporarily left the hospital. The spiraling effect of the incident condemned his 30 year-old wife – Peace Gajere to a lifelong duty of a caregiver, who also has to source for the house’s sustenance.
Haruna, who recently wrote a letter to the chairman of the National Human Right Commission, Professor Chidi Odinkalu, asking for his intervention on the issue, explained that the policeman who fired the shot and the police command refused to come to his aide all through the two years and eight months that he has been sourcing for medical help to his condition.
“My condition is so critical and likely to deteriorate unless urgent steps are taken for my treatment by experts abroad and it appears that the police that caused my injury is not willing or ready to act immediately or at all. This is because even when I met with the Assistant Commissioner of Police (ACP) upon my discharge from the hospital, the ACP told me that the police is not responsible for the act, that the police man who shot me acted on his own personal capacity as an individual and as such he should be responsible for my ordeal, despite the fact that he was on an official duty. The most painful and annoying aspect of all was when the legal head (a woman) of the Kaduna Police High Command insisted on talking to me by proxy, saying there was no point seeing them. She was referring to her and the ACP. This i objected to and insisted on seeing the person I was talking to, instead of through the phone.”
Gajere explained that he want the police to help him because life has become financially and emotionally difficult for him having spent about N3,350,000 on medication since the beginning of the 32 months that he has been down.
“At the moment, I find life difficult. I pay for virtually everything in my life, including urinating, defecating and sleeping. This is because it involves the use of drugs to aid the process and catheter for depositing of urine. I am also on physiotherapy exercise that cost N50,000 per sessions. This i do 20 sessions per months to keep my body system active.
He added that he has toyed with the idea of suicide on several occasions, but has held back by the comforting thought of his wife and his two children – aged four and two respectively. He is however asking the police to help sponsor his treatment to a specialist German hospital for corrective spinal cord surgery and physical rehabilitation at a cost of 120,000 Euro. This includes cost of surgery, transportation and hotel bills, rehabilitation fee for therapy and other logistics.
LEADERSHIP weekend however, in deciding to find out whether live bullets are used during a 21-gun salutes, spoke to some persons within the police and military formations. A reliable source within the military said, “Usually rubber bullets or blanks are used. However, it is not unheard of for live bullets to be used. It is however rare. The police source who also spoke said, the police used live bullets, but the guns are pointed up to avoid any accidents.
However, for now Haruna Gajere, while battling to get justice from those concerned, continues to lived each day as it comes.
Leadership
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