Today, January 27, marks the 11th anniversary of arguably the most devastating event in the history of Lagos State, namely, the Ikeja Army cantonment bomb blast that occurred on Sunday, January 27, 2002. All the bleeding hearts will as usual assemble at the Oke Afa, Ejigbo site of the mass grave cum monument to honour the hundreds who perished that day in the dark swamp of a canal separating Ajao Estate and Isolo/Ejigbo.
The Lagos State Government and the Isolo Local Council Development Area have routinely kept the memory of the victims alive while consistently providing emotional and material support for those they left behind. I have been waiting all these years to read a proper forensic report of the cascade of events that led to the unfortunate incident at the Ejigbo canal. One thing though is certain. That lone anonymous explosion started it all. However, what followed was a tragedy of the trust we misplaced on the military high command structure, and to a lesser extent, the police. We have been in such a hurry to forget. Hence, no meaningful effort appears to have been made to determine what really happened, and then to apportion blame. Meanwhile, the officers whose duty it was to protect and defend us in all situations, failed woefully in this instance. I have watched with dismay as the former Chief of Defence Staff, Gen. Alex Ogomudia, and the then Commander of the 9th Infantry Brigade, Gen. Kolawole Emdin, and the commanding officer of the Ikeja Cantonment, and a host of others were pulled out of service, over the past few years, in very elaborate ceremonies implying the nation’s gratitude for their meritorious services. Nothing could be farther from the truth. However, we must properly analyse what happened, 12 years ago, if we intend to avoid similar tragic occurrences in the future. What happened was definitely somebody’s fault as I am about to establish shortly.
I hasten to assert at this point that what happened was not the fault of the then President Olusegun Obasanjo. He stumbled onto the scene and made the oft-quoted politically incorrect but actually accurate remark to the effect that he did not have to be at the Ikeja cantonment. That visit, in my opinion, was definitely beyond the call of duty. The dismal failure of the officers on the ground doubly made it so. Then, he immediately travelled out to France. We latched onto the former president’ bad PR so much that we have for the past 12 years refused to ask the hard questions. This has to end.
From a posting by one MAYOOWAK in Nairaland Forum, during the 10th anniversary of the blast, in January, 2012, I gleaned the following:
“The then Commanding Officer, Brig. George Kolawole Emdin, blamed the ugly episode on the lackadaisical attitude and negligence on the part of those in authority at the time. Emdin revealed that the blast should have been pre-empted some months before it actually occurred. According to the retired army officer, the different army formations in Lagos State as of then informed the Senate Committee on Defence and the Army Headquarters of the impending disaster at the Armour Transit Depot situated within the cantonment. According to him, the ATD had become, not only obsolete but also inundated with unused ammunition from the ECOMOG Peacekeeping Mission to Liberia and Congo. (Congo?)
Emdin also said that the then Chief of Defence Staff, Ogomudia, was also aware of the precarious situation of the ATD. He disclosed that the former Chief of Army Staff had, during one of his visits to the ATD, ordered that tarpaulin be acquired to cover the littering bombs from the sun.” (What kind of protection is that? Comment mine)
Instructively, Emdin was not the first GOC (?) to be sent into an operation with inadequate resources, logistics support etc. The operation in this instance was simply to stay alive, stay safe, maintain discipline and morale among the officers and men while looking out for the interest of the larger civil populace IN COLLABORATION WITH other branches of the armed forces and the security agencies. The mess that was the ATC predated the Obasanjo administration. The long line of commanding officers at Ikeja knew what to do, i.e. separating the munitions such that a single incident does not result in the kind of tragedy whose anniversary we are now sadly marking. I want to emphasise that I am not accusing anyone of ignorance. They definitely knew what to do. What was lacking was self-motivation. Just one company of troops applying itself to the task only six hours every month would have achieved the adequate separation 15 years before the sad event. Unfortunately, that would have been in the heydays of the now discredited military regime. Then, professional army commanders spent more time hobnobbing with their juniors who had juicy appointments as military administrators or ministers. Discipline went to the dogs. Who had time for an ammunition dump? Hence, the failure of housekeeping at the Ikeja cantonment cannot in anyway be dumped at the feet of the brand new legislature which had no idea what the issue was all about. It had nothing to do with budgetary allocation.
I was there, and so I will start by recounting my observations, deductions and limited action. I will conclude by discussing the apparent inability of the officers and men at Ikeja cantonment to make the right deductions from the observations they made and to disseminate same for the benefit of the political authorities and the civil populace. Considering the actually low casualty within the Ikeja cantonment and the immediate environs, it then becomes clear that not one person needed have died at Oke Afa canal. When the public was belatedly informed about six hours later, the tragedy had already occurred.
The time was about 6pm. I was driving due north on the service lane of Ikorodu Road, close to the turn off to Gbagada when the initial explosion occurred. Looking up, I saw a mixed dark and white cloud rising slowly about 15 degree west of the road. Then, followed another explosion. The cloud rose perhaps 500 metres and then reignited in a brilliant flash. Because there was no further link between the flash, visible from miles around, and the ground, I now concluded that the exploding material must have been a dispersed solid. Did water get into the Calcium Carbide storage at the Nigerian Foundries Limited, I asked myself? Meanwhile, the explosion continued as I made the loop at Anthony and continued westbound on the Oworonsoki to Apapa Expressway. As I passed the defunct Atlantic Textile Mills, I immediately triangulated and placed the source of the explosion smack in the middle of the Ikeja Military Cantonment. I had no doubt whatsoever.
I continued the drive home to Okota and when I could safely do so, I stopped to tell a few clusters of people looking up into the blazing evening sky that there was nothing to worry about since it was the ammo dump exploding, a localised event. I must have impacted less than 500 people that evening, and I don’t know how many believed me. To this day, I still regret that I did not have cause to stop by in my former neighbourhood in Ajao Estate through which later passed the deadly surge to the death canal. Maybe, I could have stopped it. There were very few cellphones in those days.
I accurately deduced in less than five minutes the cause of the explosion. Surely, the military, at the very epicentre, would have had no difficulty in drawing the same conclusion and taking appropriate action. I would want to assume, against my better judgment, that there was no total breakdown in command and control. How else could one explain the fact that neither the Nigerian Police nor the Nigerian Airforce, nor indeedChannelsTV, which are in the same neighbourhood, were informed in a timely manner (within 20 minutes?) what was afoot. ChannelsTV was a mere five minutes jog from the north gate of Ikeja cantonment.
The deaths at Oke Afa, which we are marking this week, was definitely the fault of the military commanders at Ikeja. Only in Nigeria would people go scot free after such gross negligence. Losing control in the middle of what looked like an attack (real or imagined) is plain cowardice. In other climes, a series of court martial would have been the most likely response.
I hereby join other Nigerians to once again offer our condolences to the bereaved in the hope that NEVER AGAIN would such avoidable disaster be visited on our long suffering people.
No comments:
Post a Comment