Like the Biblical perilous pestilence, they struck in quick successions and etched indelible scars on the nation’s terribly wrinkled conscience.
In less than 48 hours, the quads of Lagos-Ibadan Expressway road accident, Nigeria’s nightmare (the crashed Allied Air cargo plane) in Ghana, the ill-fated Dana plane crash and Bauchi church bomb blast literally grounded the nation.
Apart from touching on existential realities and emptiness of life, they also revealed the predictive after-effects of a warped and corrupt society.
Bob Dylan’s prognosis seems to capture the chain of horror that befell Nigeria and stalked many homes in the last one week. In his 1962 song, “Blowin in the Wind”, he asks; “Yes, how many times must a man look up before he can see the sky? Yes, how many ears must one man have before he can hear people cry? Yes, how many deaths will it take till he knows that too many people have died? The answer my friend is blowin in the wind.”
In Iju-Ishaga, where Dana’s MD 83 plane or what Dylan called “the flying cannon ball(s)” crashed, horror did blow in the wind. From the scenes of bomb blast in Harvest Field Church, Bauchi, killings in Maiduguri and Onitsha to Lagos-Ibadan catastrophe and many others that followed, tears rolled and anguish spiraled down the sky.
No one could capture the saddened mood better than a tenant of a building struck by the Dana plane in Lagos. He looked fixedly at a scurrying reptile on the narrow crevice of what used to be the wall of his house; his bloodshot eyes glued to the wreckage and nothing seemed to make sense to him. As his looks questioned life, the vast debris and hundreds of lives buried in the womb of the rubbles right in front of him were like mere surreal images. Nothing made sense!
A middle-aged woman, apparently a relative of one of the 153 victims of the plane crash, couldn’t hold back her tears when she saw charred bodies on the ground. She wept inconsolably and blurted out, “So, this is life? This is where my brother ended it. Is this how the labour of many years would perish?”
Indeed, the accidents were about perished labour, eclipsed dream and aborted hope. How does one explain the fate of Maimuna Anyene, a Connecticut-based Nigerian woman, who died along with her husband, sister, her four kids, two cousins and her mother-in-law?
What about the Onita sisters, Josephine and Jennifer? Both graduates of the University of North Texas and Texas Tech University respectively, they were described as promising youngsters whose future held a lot of prospects.
No one knows what is happening next, or who is next in the cataclysm that shapes living in Nigeria. That on its own is the precariousness of living in a country whose destiny seems to have been cast among the swine.
How does one describe the loss of close to 200 Nigeria’s eminent men and women, who died in one fell swoop for no fault of theirs? Do the killings of 16 members of the Movement for the Actualisation of the Sovereign State of Biafra (MASSOB) and 16 suspected Boko Haram members, who were gunned down by security agents in Onitsha and Maiduguri respectively, between Monday and Wednesday, last week, and others unreported, not reveal the triviality of living in Nigeria?
What fate awaits the children who lost their parents when Dana’s “flying cannon ball” crashed into their apartment? How would they cope with the mental pang of losing their parents while running errands for them? Which compensation will be enough to assuage relatives of Iju-Ishaga crash and residents who are said to be afraid of ghosts haunting them?
What about goods and vehicles damaged on the Lagos-Ibadan Expressway? How does a nation that has enormous capacity to protect sanctity of life turn a slaughtering slab? Should a nation in search of foreign investments compromise standards, even at the expense of its people? Can a nation, like Nigeria, lying supine in the cesspool of corruption, ever spring up from its vomit? Can this tiger change its spots? Many questions definitely hang in the air!
Perhaps, Nigerians should begin to look away from the conventional to explore other sources of addressing their challenges. Perhaps, the country needs to appease the gods and seek their preternatural interventions in fighting the behemoth of corruption serving as the substructure of insecurity, road accidents and plane crashes.
Perhaps, as a nation, we need to redefine our approach to life in order to understand its sanctity. We may have to be tutored by serious nations on the praxis of living.
To get it right, Nigeria may have to travel many roads and cover long distances to redeem its ruined destiny.
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