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What is a Nigerian life worth?

The night Umaru Yar’Adua returned to Abuja, it was like the Biblical thief in the night.  He landed in Abuja’s Nnamdi Azikiwe Airport in the small hours, and his air ambulance glided into a secure, closed hanger.  A discreet ambulance reportedly pulled into the hanger to ferry the man home.
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Outside, however, there was no hiding the event.  Hundreds of policemen battled back journalists and spectators that had come to observe what was supposed to be a Central Intelligence Agency-style operation. 

Of perhaps greater interest, two battalions of Nigerian soldiers were deployed to the streets between the airport and the city of Abuja.  It is still unclear to me whether this was just a show of muscle and iron, or somebody was scared that, halfway through the night, a mischievous Nigerian might try to snatch a sick man from an ambulance in a semi-military convoy. 

But that is not my story.  Eleven days ago, on February 24, I received a horrible picture that was circulating on the Internet.  My beneficiary was “nigerianpolitics.com” and the picture was of ghastly scene of dead bodies and body parts on a Nigerian road.  At first, I thought a Rwanda-style carnage had taken place in the area, but the caption to the photograph read:

“Armed robbers ambushed the luxury bus in the picture and ordered everyone to handover their valuables - those that had nothing of significance to give were ordered to lie down on the road and the bus driver was ordered at gunpoint to drive over them.”

Slowly, the story has circulated among Nigerians worldwide, and the outrage finally reached the government last week.  The Senate summoned the Minister of Police Affairs, Ibrahim Lame. 

In turn, the Minister summoned the Inspector-General, Mr. Ogbonnaya Onovo, and gave him an unprecedented tongue-lashing.  He called the police a failure. 

"The current rate of crime across the nation, rising cases of extra-judicial killings, human rights violations, robberies, high-profile assassination and deliberate failure to comply with government directives are testimony to the sheer incapacity or wilful defiance of police high command" to the efforts of the government, he said. 

Drawing attention to the current administration investment in the Force, he warned it might have to deal severely with the top brass. 

Onovo was surprised he and his most senior officials had been called to receive such a dressing-down from the Minister.  He blamed logistics problems, poverty, corruption and religious tensions.

He said he knew nothing about the armed robbery reported in the picture in circulation, but that there had been a “similar” one, on July 31, 2009.  In that incident, he said, an out of control “heavy duty” vehicle had run over bus passengers who had been forced to sit on the road by armed robbers, and 19 people were killed.

The Federal Road Safety Corps (FRSC) also said it had no record of the incident.  Like Mr. Onovo, however, it recalled a “similar” one on August 1, 2009.  It said that one occurred on the Sagamu-Ijebu Ode Road at about 10:30 p.m. when passengers that had been forced to lie down on the road were run over by an oncoming truck, with 19 passengers killed.

I think this is a sad tale of two tragic Nigerian institutions: the Police and the FRSC.  I am no detective, but from the look of it, the widely-circulated picture is shameless whether it came from one of two different days in 2009, or February 2010. 

And it is doubtful that the picture is from the Ijebu-Ode/Benin City Expressway.  What road were other road users using between 10:30 p.m. and whenever this picture was taken the following day, and why did it not make national news?

Secondly, the incident had to have happened in broad daylight, not at 10:30 p.m., as the FRSC said.  If the accident took place the night before, but the picture was taken in the morning, where were the dutiful men and women of the Police and the FRSC during all those hours?

If the accident happened at night, at what time did the Police and the FRSC arrive (since the FRSC says they were involved in the “rescue operations” along with the Police and the Ogun State Traffic authorities), and when did they take all those bodies to the Onabanjo University Teaching Hospital? 

And if, as the Police and the FRSC say, it was an onrushing vehicle that created the mayhem, how did that vehicle manage to separate the robbers from the passengers to make certain only the passengers were killed but not the robbers who must have been around them? 

If any robbers were killed or injured, why has neither the Police nor the FRSC said anything about them?  If there were 41 passengers on the bus and 19 were killed, where are the other 22 who, along with the bus driver, could have helped the Police with a lot of information? 

And why is it that, in the words of Mr. Onovo, “only the two drivers of the two vehicles were arrested”?  Why was it necessary to arrest the driver of the bus that had been stopped by the robbers?

This tragic story simply reiterates the point that these institutions are incompetent and inefficient.  Sometimes, the greatest danger on the road may not be armed robbers, but the authorities.  How could one accident have been reported on two different days by the Police and the FRSC, with divergent details?  Or are we really talking about two of them?

Of the February 2010 road accident, it is obvious that neither institution knows what it is talking about.  If a terrible robbery and accident combo of this magnitude remains a mystery to them, what else don’t they know about our roads?  How many others do they know nothing about?  And if they are blind on such a well-traveled highway, what presence do they really have on roads? 

That takes me back to the Police Minister. 

His outrage about the Force is commendable, but the truth is that his words about them are applicable to the very government he represents and almost every Minister in the federal cabinet. A Nigerian life is not worth anything, unless you are a Yar’Adua, dead or dying.  In that case, at two o’clock in the morning, you can have thousands of armed men blocking off empty city streets in your protection.

Minister Lame, we, the Nigerian people, are the common victim of all of you. 

The People’s Parliament: A clarification

Following a report in The Punch last week, which named me as having joined in the formation of a People’s Parliament in New York, I have been inundated with a lot of enquiries. 

I wish to explain that I have only been invited to a conference on Nigeria next weekend that, I understand, will take a parliamentary form. 

I have neither discussed nor explored, with anyone, the formation of anything.  

•    [email protected]
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