16 Dec 2005 |
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I had problems reading the details of the crash of the Sosoliso aircraft that resulted in the death of so many Nigerian children, so many adults, all over 100 - less than two months after a plane crashed in Lisa village and another one crashed somewhere around Kaduna. The human aspects of the disaster touch us all to our fundaments. There was a mother waiting for her children returning home on holiday, a husband at the airport to welcome his wife back home; a family losing all the children, the wife who has reached menopause who is now without children, parents fighting over corpses, bodies disappearing from the mortuary; parents being asked to identify the corpses of their children who had spoken with them only an hour earlier on cell phone...agony, pain, tragedy most horrendous, lives ending before they started, hopes thrown into ash, life becoming flames in broad daylight. One parent screamed: "now I have nobody to call me daddy anymore!." There were even parents at the airport who watched their children and loved ones as they brunt to death, and no help came, and no one could do anything. "I watched my child roast to death" , one of them lemaneted. Today, Port Harcourt is a sad city. It will be remembered for long as the graveyard of the Sosoliso 107. The cries of those souls that perished will be heard even if as a distant echo by anyone who passes through that airport or works there. In the last week, I have met grieving grandfathers and grandmothers, angry aunties and uncles, friends and relations of the dead who are just wondering why this has happened to them. They ask: why me? I have seen tear-soaked faces; women wept across the nation in front of television sets, grown ups broke down, even octogenarians are now running away from Nigerian airports; they don't want to fly across Nigerian airspace. Many of the parents of the dead children are also dead too in a manner of speaking; the population of the living dead in our land has increased. Family lives have been disrupted, relationships now face special challenges. If the husband of the woman who has reached menopause decides to marry another woman and raise other children, how about the poor woman? If the in-laws of the woman with an only child accuse her of bringing bad luck to their brother despite the dowry that they paid, how about that? Ordinary Nigerians and families value human lives. Parents have been scarred for life, husbands and wives have been hurt, children have been stabbed. The key human aspects of what has happened would come in the nearest future; unfortunately how each family deals with its loss would not be reported on the pages of newspapers. Given our peculiar circumstances and the average African's attachment to children, counselling as applied in the Western sense may not be enough to address the problem. Who would counsel or console the students of Loyola Jesuit College? They will return to school in January to meet empty seats in their classrooms and empty beds in the dormitories, and that emptiness will represent the friends that sat with them before Christmas, friends that they had made over the years. Planes crash in other places too, aircraft are mechanical objects, and so they can fail. But what we have come to realise is that here in Nigeria, planes drop out of the sky not because accidents must occur, but simply because of the many contradictions in Nigerian life and society. What happened in Port Harcourt was not an act of God; it was the direct consequence of bad governance. The Nigerian government is so bad on land, it is also bad in the air. A day after the plane crashed, it rained heavily in the early hours of the morning in Lagos, and I received a text message from someone who observed that the angels were crying in Heaven! Human beings are crying on earth too! We are all so sad. Those parents who lost their children, the husbands whose wives died, the women who have been forced into early widowhood, the young children who have lost their friends, the grandfathers and grandmothers who now have to bury their children's children: please do not expect them to love Nigeria anymore. And this is the real tragedy: in more than six years, the Obasanjo government has forced more persons to lose faith in Nigeria through its abdication of responsibility, through its absent-mindedness, through its obsession with ceremonies. I am not always superstitious but I have heard the view expressed that when recent events in the country are taken together, the clearest summation is that God is trying to send a message across to President Obasanjo and Nigerians. No man can read the mind of God, but we can reach a number of conclusions on the basis of the hard evidence before us. Following the Sosoliso plane crash, President Obasanjo went into a rage in the public square. He summoned a stakeholders' meeting which was televised on public television and he was so angry in the course of the meeting, he almost grabbed the microphone from one of the speakers. The President cut a pitiable figure screaming and trying to micro-manage the aviation sector. Unfortunately, no country has ever been led to greatness by the President screaming on television and threatening fire and brimstone. May I ask: was that leadership? If the President had done what should be done in the past six years, he would not need to micromanage the aviation sector. He would not face the threat of being remembered as the President who left office as an undertaker. He has called a stakeholders' meeting for the aviation sector. Is he going to do the same thing for the health sector, the education sector, the tourism sector, the oil and gas sector...? Indeed anywhere you turn today in Nigeria, you are bound to meet the same old stories and leave with the painful impression that nothing has changed. Many of the lives that were lost in the Sosoliso crash and the Bellview tragedy could have been saved if there was a proper transportation network in the country. With good roads and a functional rail system, many Nigerians would rather not travel by air. In Europe, you can go from one end to the other just sitting in a nice train, and without wasting much time. Here in Nigeria, there is no functional rail system in spite of so much money already spent in the past six years, and the roads are terribly dangerous. The reality is that the people are now so helpless they have had to return to the roads. And if you think that is good news, please note that armed robbers are also back on the highways too. The more you look at it, the more you are convinced that Tom Peters, the management guru who turned down an invitation to Nigeria at the last minute, is right after all. The British and the Americans have also warned their nationals to beware of Nigerian skies. Now let 's talk about education. The majority of the victims in the Sosoliso crash were students who had gone far away from their parents to get good education. Parents want the best for their children. But perhaps if there were good schools of the same standards as the Loyola Jesuit in Rivers state, those parents would not have been under pressure to send those kids so far away. One of the affected parents who happens to be a medical doctor has observed that many of the children died from suffocation: if help had arrived on time, many of them could have lived. But alas, in six years of democracy, the health sector in Nigeria is in a terrible state. The country's capacity for managing emergencies is almost nil. No water, no fire engines, no facilities: those basic things that would make life worth the effort in Nigeria are never available! The President in a desperate, and I dare say laughable, attempt to show that he was doing something about the tragedy that occurred fired the Permanent Secretary and a Director in the Ministry of Aviation. He has also ordered that Sosoliso airlines and Chachangi should be grounded. Who is he trying to impress please? Why must we wait for tragedy to occur before we wake up in this country? The Permanent Secretary and the Aviation Director may not have caused the air crash, but their failure to do their job may have contributed to the failures in the aviation sector. But must we lose close to 250 lives before the President realises that wrong pegs in wrong holes must be turned adrift? The Senate has been asking the President to fire the Minister of Aviation as well. But I doubt if Babalola Borishade would be fired. His spin-doctors are already saying that he inherited the problems in the aviation sector, he did not create them. It is also being said that the President will not fire him because he is loyal. After all, didn't the President present him before the National Assembly three times before his nomination was approved? If the President wants Borishade as Minister, there may be nothing that anyone can do about that. But let the President and everyone note this: in every Ministry that the man has served, there have been problems. When he was Minister of Education, that sector was almost completely shut down at the tertiary level. If Borishade feels comfortable with the corpses that are now turning his Ministry into an extension of the graveyard, with over 200 corpses on the record, good for him. And if Borishade is innocent, is Isa Yuguda, the man who was in that Ministry before him also innocent of the President's charge that the Aviation Ministry is a cesspool of corruption? We would like to know. And why is Bellview airline still being allowed in the skies? Why Sosoliso and Chachangi? Why not Bellview too? Okay, there was a letter about Sosoliso and Chachangi which the Ministry refused to act upon. But did we need a letter to know that the aviation sector is in trouble? Shouldn't the Presidency even look beyond the letter? And is it not the practise in government quarters that nothing is ever acted upon until the problem under consideration becomes an issue? We are paying a heavy price for the lack of standards. In this country, nobody pays any attention to standards. Consumers in all sectors are treated badly and service providers are not bothered, In the aviation sector alone, we have heard stories of run-ways that do not work, control towers that have no facilities, old and poorly maintained aircraft, expired Tokunbo aircraft, overworked pilots who dare not complain, airline owners who cut corners because they cannot meet up with required expenses in a capital intensive industry, airlines that serve no purpose other than the massaging of the ego of the owner, and hapless passengers who are treated shabbily at the airports. How many more lives would be lost before this nightmare ends? When and where is the next funeral party as we move towards 2007?
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