Nigeria faulty systems killed My James Ocholi , Blessing his wife and their son Joshua! Minister of
Labor and Employment, James Ocholi, his wife Blessing, and his son Joshua were
all killed in a car accident on occurred on Sunday, March 6th, at Kilometre 57, along
Kaduna-Abuja highway.
It is only in Nigeria that
the government public official drives as is if they were going to commit
suicide! In well developed countries,
the only vehicles that drive so fast on the road are Ambulances and Fire fighter
vehicles.
But in my own father land everybody
are VIPs’, there is the usual scenario of convoys of
siren-blaring vehicles trying to force their way out of the serious traffic
gridlock. In the process, there is immediate pandemonium, sometimes resulting
in fatal accidents. Public officials, without exemption whom security details and convoy vehicles are attached always behave like thugs on highway, speeding at breath
taking and reckless is their trade mark! They are above the law! Police will drive against the traffic, local government
councilor will blow siren…ministers will go on convoy at a very top speed.
The havoc done by this
public servants are just too numerous to mention…”Chief Dapo Sarumi , the then Minister of Co-operation and Integration
in Africa. On 26 December, his convoy was involved in a road accident on the
Lagos-Epe Expressway. Fortunately, for the minister, he walked out of it alive.
So did all the travellers in his convoy. But the same cannot be said of the
other party in the crash. In what ended as a honeymoon tragedy, a newly-wed
couple lost their lives.” According to the bride's father, Dr. Shyngle Wigwe,
who was a former director-general of Nigeria Television Authority (NTA), said ‘the
cooperation minister's most uncooperative disposition at the accident scene led
to the death of his daughter and her husband.’
University
don , Professor Festus Iyayi, a notable university teacher, poet and former
National President of the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) was killed by the convoy of Kogi State governor, Idris Wada, at Banda
village along the highway in a head-on collision with a Hilux pick-up van in
the convoy !
“Public officials
and their convoys behaving like thugs on highways and even inner cities have
become the unfortunate lot of Nigerians. There will be instant rage,
condemnation and platitudes about probes after tragedy strikes. But in the end,
each incident fizzles out of contention and it becomes business as usual for
the killer squads called official convoys, until another fatal one occurs. No
official to whom security details and convoy vehicles are attached is exempted,
from the offices of the president, governors, Ministers to Local Government
chairmen and top uniformed men, et cetera. If they are not involved in fatal
accidents that claim more of the lives of innocent Nigerians going about their
normal businesses than the convoy psychopaths, their security aides beat up
road users – fellow citizens – for not giving way to their ‘oga’ to drive
through.
That was what
happened in 2008 when six armed naval ratings attached to a Naval Rear Admiral
went wild about 6pm one Monday evening on Muri Okunola Street, Victoria Island,
Lagos, and beat up and stripped a lady identified as Uzoma Okere; as well as
forcibly handcuffed her for not quickly giving way for the ratings’ boss’
convoy. It was a celebrated case of rights’ violation that compelled the then
sitting president, the late Umaru Yar’Adua to direct former Chief of Defence
Staff, Air Marshall Paul Dike, to investigate what truly transpired. The
outcome of that investigation is yet unknown to the public till date.”
It is the high
time that the government and the public officials to do away with this
“nuisance” and “madness” and behave responsibly among the citizenry. Or do
these officials forget that they were in the midst of the same people who voted
them in the first place?
~Omoba Toba Omidele III
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