By Semiu Okanlawon
As I hit the keypad to begin this piece on Sunday, I realised that it was just three weeks to the one year after we counted number of the dead, the injured and the missing from the Bodija, Ibadan scene of bombs explosions on January 17, 2023.
Adeyi Avenue, scene of the 2023 horror in Ibadan, is just 10-minute drive from Islamic High School, Bashorun, in the same capital city where another horrific scene played out last week, this time around, feeding innocent children to the jaws of needless death in the name of an end-of-year giveaway.
But we thought our tragedy would stop in Ibadan. Little did we realise that this December would indeed be ‘dirtied’ and bloodied with the most tragic spread of misfortunes in Anambra and the Federal Capital Territory, Abuja.
What would have been another tragedy in Lagos on Saturday night was averted as the stage collapsed at a concert organised by popular singer, Qudus Fakoya Oluwadamilare, popularly known as Qdot.
This may have prompted the Lagos state government to come out on Sunday reminding charity groups, show promoters and others to be mindful of crow control warning against breaking its 4 year record of no-stampede in the state.
The Federal Capital Territory, Osun, Ogun and many others suddenly woke up to the need to fence up against bloody Christmas and New Year as more individuals and organisations braced up to do giveaways for the season.
But then, is this just about crowd management and control? The deaths we have recorded in Ibadan, Abuja and Okija in Anambra state in the last one week speak only of one thing – poverty.
Much as one might want to agree that most Nigerians are unorganised and indisciplined in the words of President Bola Tinubu during his maiden media chat, the reality is that orderliness and calm cannot be expected virtues in an atmosphere of acute hunger.
Like Ola Rotimi, in The gods are not to blame,“we have left our pot unwashed and our food now burns.”
Desperation is an attendant consequence of giveaway economy if we must call a spade a spade and this economy, to be honest, appears to now survive on the crutches of benevolence of the privileged.
Right from the era of COVID-19 that pauperised not only the Nigerian population but the global community, the Nigerian economy has been sliding into what we can now call palliative economy where the majority now wait on the largesse of the government, a few privileged individuals and organisations for their daily meals.
In a strange and sad turn of event and after COVID-19 has been brought under control, we seem to have accepted palliative as a way of life; awaiting distribution of small loafs of bread, repackaged rice, small sachets of palm oil and salt from people whose duties are not to feed mouths directly but to either make laws or implement policies that create abundant opportunities for the mass of the people to have purchasing powers.
In the face of disappearing purchasing power, allocations of food items to elected political officers and appointees for onward distributions to constituents continue to fuel desperation, corruption, fraud and needless deaths.
In the circumstance, the current system creates small ‘gods’ of political profiteers who return to constituencies to boost their profiles with foods freely allocated to them as palliatives to the people.
Media reports are awash with instances of politcians who hoarded food items allocated to their constituencies until their birthdays and other special occasions when they release such after being repackaged as souvenirs bearing their photos and campaign slogans.
Indeed, there have been reports of hoarded food items that went bad in warehouses simply because the godfather has not found occasions auspicious enough to deploy them for scoring the desired political goals.
With the palliative culture now solidly with us, more charity groups and individuals, religious groups and others have doubled their efforts at giving.
Alms giving is part of most religious obligations to the less privileged. However, a system that elevates this acts of religiousness to a statecraft and policy is rendering the nation prostrate.
With inflation indices showing apparent and consistent abjectness, there is a huge population of the citizenry that has been rendered prostrate. There is no argument here! This much has been stamped as the true picture of the affairs by government-owned National Bureau of Statistics which confirmed that about 65% of the total population cannot afford decent meals.
There are other worrying dimensions of the national poverty that the NBS, the World Bank, International Monetary Funds and others have held out in our faces to underscore the very reasons people would do anything to get a share of freebies, including of course, trampling on one another.
Oriyomi Hamzat, boss of Agidigbo FM, Ibadan now slammed into Agodi Correctional Centre for his alleged roles in the Ibadan stampede painted the horrifying moments when the crowd kept surging forward even amidst the confusion, stamping feet on already suffocated and unconscious children in the hopes they would get to collect part of the largesse.
Shouldn’t it therefore be expected that the mere mention of free foods anywhere in the country today will become an instant and sure invitation to desperation and confusion?
A lady narrated in the course of the week how it has become very scary to take free foods, money and other items to the usual locations where beggars receive such gifts in Nigeria these days.
I read on instagram recently, the account of a lady who led a team to hand out free packs of food at Magboro, near the headquarters of The PUNCH newspapers along the Lagos-Ibadan Highway. In the confusion that ensued after the food packs had been exhausted, her wig was removed by one of the angry beneficiaries who felt what he got was not enough. She however got home standing in front of the mirror before she realised her head was without her wig. She returned to the scene and the young man who snatched the wig said she should ‘bail’ her wig out by paying N2000. She did!
Pen Cinema, Agege, Ebute Metta, Idi Araba, and other areas of Lagos are notable locations where people, to fulfil certain spiritual needs, visit to dole out free foods and money to beggars. All other major cities of Nigeria have such camps of the hungry and the needy. The situation are said to be the same.
We must never play the ostrich over the real catalyst for the growing desperation among Nigerians in recent times. The sudden hikes in the costs of energy all within a spate of one year as we have witnessed in how much we pay for fuel, electricity have directly pushed more millions into misery. The relatively comfortable class of Nigerians who were the buffer in form of succor for the extremely poor have themselves been cut off that ‘privileged’ position and now caught in the web of financial mess.
With that, those who could afford a bag of rice out which they were giving out some quantities are themselves now buying in small measures.
There are reports these days that it is becoming increasingly dangerous to venture into the den of beggars without having surplus. There are now cases of givers almost getting mobbed when they don’t have enough to go round. And it is almost impossible to go round in the face of the surging population of the hunger stricken.
Stampedes are not new to us. We had recorded tragedies at religious events as in the case of of Benin, Edo State stampede of 1999 where many died seeking spiritual diet under the ministration of Bishop Reinhard Bonnke.
Apart from that, the worst we have had perhaps, was the 2014 stampede by job seekers at the recruitment centres of the Nigerian Immigration Service.
The stampedes of Katsina, Bauchi, Lagos, and a few others in the last 10 years happened at intervals. Never did Nigeria have it so much in quick successions that have thrown some states into panic mode reading out riot acts sounding like “that must never happen in my state.”
Yoruba taught us in one adage “Teni waju ba jin si koto, o ko ara yoku logbon” (meaning when he who is in the lead falls into a ditch, others behind must take heed of the dangers that lay ahead.”
But the tragedy is that what is done cannot be undone. Obe ti ge omo lowo, o n lo fi obe pamo (meaning a child goes to keep away sharp knife only after he had cut his fingers with the same knife).
Of what use are these reactive measures when these only happen after each tragedy?
The death of 35 children in one fell swoop is a tragedy of immense proportion. Every serious country must do everything to neutralise all catalysts that aid such ugliness.