The Crash and Nigeria’s Looming Change 

 

This is a sad story of a nation in pain in the midst of plenty. I was trying to join the debate that Sunday on the re-naming of a university established by an Act of parliament in 1961, which an aberrant chief executive, in a brain wave, felt should wear another toga, even illegitimately, when a bolt jolted my quiet. It was a crash and an explosion from hell.

Recalling my opinion on the hero of June 12, 1993, as Professor Humphrey Nwosu and not any of the contestants for the presidency, in an article, titled, “Babangida: Saint or Sinner”, in 2010 in some major newspapers, I was at that instance amusing myself at the crooked logic of people giving a prize to a model and not the designer. I disagree with those who do violence to the truth about democracy in Nigeria. It does not exist yet in this country.

I was on this when tragedy struck my community that Sunday. That explosion changed the calm of the sedate community I had lived in for two decades. The air crash was just four houses away from mine. Mr. Sam Olarenwaju, a retired senior police officer of the 1980s and accountant, banged at my door. “There is a plane crash at Olaniyi Street,” he thundered. He used the superior training of the police of the 1960s to join in fire fighting. Meanwhile, we alerted the police, the media and the fire brigade.

The Federal Airport Authority of Nigeria, FAAN, responded timely with their helicopters circling the burning aircraft and, perhaps, also fighting the flame. The police were nowhere to be found until about two hours later. They even arrived, like stragglers after a battle, in threes and fours. The so-called Civil Defence Corps personnel were not in sight. The local fire brigade had gone into action after detouring wisely through the rail line. The Nigerian Red Cross reacted forcefully and quickly to the scene.

In the good old days, the police would have been on the scene swiftly to cordon off the area and evacuate the people near the crash spot to safety. That was the police that had West African School Certificate and Primary Six Certificate holders. Degree holders are now in the rank and file of the force. There are six-nearby police outfits in the disaster area. The police flopped in their duties and caused avoidable crowd-control problems, owing to their lag. People started to mill round the periphery of the disaster spot, arriving in wild droves of humanity.

The old police exhibited professional efficiency then at the risk of their lives and took initiatives to protect life and property. They were not beggars on the streets. If the new generation police had acted timely and decisively, it would have created easy passage for other emergency agencies to operate without hindrance. There would not have been the utter breakdown of law and order experienced on the crash scene.

Even on the day after, some policemen were still begging some traders at Aliu Street and others for money to fuel their vehicles back to their stations. This is disgraceful. Mama Lola would tell the story better of how she parted with N200. They wanted N 500 support. FAAN fire fighters tried their best to put out the fire on the aircraft but there was no complementary support aside the ones organised by the residents of the area and the small detachment of a local fire brigade outfit from Oko-Oba, a neighbouring community, to extinguish the cauldron in the three affected houses. Fire brigade vans were trapped in traffic jams because of police inertia. The old police would have dammed the rush of the sea of heads that stupidly surged to the crash site with flammable motor vehicles, minibuses and motorcycles by cordoning off the area around the disaster spot.

The crash at Olaniyi Street exposed the working of the Nigerian security system as below average. The crowd teemed in the scores of thousands and blocked all the exits and lee ways because the police failed to get there before them to establish the order that such events demanded. This hampered rescue efforts. The Red Cross operatives were hamstrung by the nuisance of the crowd. Until that fateful Sunday, one still reckoned Nigerians to be humane and passionate beings. That reasoning was misplaced. Whereas Nigerian men and women wept and grieved at such mishaps in the last century, the present generation jollied as if it was game and fun as they streamed to the area, chattering and giggling as if savouring one drama by “Baba Sala.” The fine side of the sensibilities and sensitivities of the new Nigerians has been blunted by leaderlessness. They showed no sympathies for those trapped in the aircraft. After all, they were big people who flew while they, the street Arabs, pined away in penury and joblessness. They form the coming generation.

To some of them, it was time to get part of the national cake the big shots looted. They showed it by trying to overpower the lacklustre security people to loot the aircraft of whatever was left in it. In fact, they started to loot the houses affected until soldiers drafted to the scene to contain the rampaging chaos, bared their fangs. The soldiers did not look at faces as they chased the looters and recovered stolen properties, firmly warning that they would brook no nonsense and were there to instill discipline. It was then the crowd that thickened until mid-day the day after started to thin away. One did not know that the present generation lacked the milk of mercy until that Sunday. People were roasting in fire but the pre-occupation of those men and women, ages downwards from 40, was how to covet the victims’ property.

And they were all dressed in the new national dress jeans and slacks. Some with fat tummies rolled themselves to the crash site like barrels of oil. Others stunted like Chinese dolls, trotted there like a pack of jackals. What demon has descended on this nation to rob the people of that kind-heartedness that made Nigerians to be regarded before as hospitable? They now worship mammon as preached by the prosperity prophets who go for the kill with no holds barred. The more danger to this nation is the apparent idleness of those men and women who were at the crash site for purposes other than to help. And they were mostly university and polytechnic graduates. On the Monday morning after the crash, the area was still flooded by a mammoth crowd waiting to loot houses because they were jobless. It was that type of crowd that brought Adolf Hitler to power in Germany in 1933. It was the mentality of those types of deprived people that Vladimir Lenin worked on to install Bolshevism. Hugo Chavez is productively directing them to change the colour of Latin-American politics. They are not stupid. They have only lost that benign attachment to the state and so do not respect authority. It is a dangerous development that Nigeria will confront presently. Beware of the spark that starts the Prairie fire.

I mourn my neighbours who perished that Sunday. I pray for the repose of their souls. What an unkind cut for those three orphans whose parents were smoked to death, still in mutual embrace, as they bade farewell en route the land beyond!