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Vulgarity At Iredia’s NTA By Babayola Toungo
My heart goes out to the 117 families that lost their loved ones in the fatal Bellview Boeing 737 crash in Lissa, Ogun State. I also sincerely extend my heartfelt condolences to General Olusegun Obasanjo over the lost of his heartthrob, Stella Obasanjo, who died from complications arising from a surgery meant to enhance her youth, presumably by removing fats from her midsection, at the ripe old age of 60. That Sunday the 23rd, October 2005, Nigerians collectively woke up to the realisation that a bad day is ahead when the news filtered in that a plane belonging to Bellview Airlines has gone missing since the previous night and no one has any information on its whereabouts. When many were trying to digest this, news came from far away Spain that Obasanjo’s wife is dead.
Most Nigerians spent the whole of Sunday without any tangible news as to the fate of the plane and its passengers; but it was apparent that any plane that will be lost for that long a time may certainly be doomed. What could be done realistically at that stage is only ‘search and recovery’ and certainly not ‘search and rescue’. Only God knows how the people in that plane lost their lives on impact; how many might have survived the initial impact and waited in vain for their government to come and rescue them; how many might have sustained minor injuries but were hampered by one obstacle or the other from escaping a certain death. All these questions are mere speculations, but the fact remains that those passengers lost their lives, and destined to die that day no matter what anyone inside or out side the plane could have done.
But I fail to understand how a government could be so uncaring as to remain nonchalant when 117 of its citizens are entombed in the belly of a plane, more than 60 feet below the earth’s surface, while “celebrating” the lives and times of one woman who was healthy a week earlier, but felt the need to go and “panel beat” her body to enable her look 60 years young at her upcoming 60 years birthday anniversary. Please no pun intended here as I said this with all sense of responsibility and sympathy for her bereaved family. It appeared to me that black Sunday that government functionaries were trying very hard to outdo each other in fawning Obasanjo on the death of the love of his live, while knowing fully well that 117 others were out there, and only God knows their condition. It is my believe that governance came to a stand still that day for Stella Obasanjo, so serious effort was made to locate the doomed 737 and its passengers and crew. All agencies responsible for either tracking a plane from one airport to the next, or those involved in search and rescue, simply went to sleep.
It is the same Obasanjo government in December 2003 with fanfare launched a Satellite into orbit in far away China, costing the nation more than a billion Naira, with much chest thumbing and back beating that we have finally joined the comity of nations with satellites in orbit. The Minster of Science & Technology listed a litany of benefits accruable to Nigeria as a nation, including instant mapping of the whole country within three minutes. But a plane, a whole plane, got missing three minutes after taking off from an airport and no one could say anything about its whereabouts for almost 18 hours until a villager stumbled on its wreckage per chance and got in touch with a private broadcasting outfit. AIT, the television station that brought to Nigerians the raw and uncut images of the plane’s wreckage got for its trouble a ban from the regulatory agency, the National Broadcasting Commission (NBC). Tonnie Iredia had a filed day with his NTA devoting almost 24 hours broadcast time to Stella to the exclusion of the plane crash victims.
In my opinion, the vulgarity, insensitivity, callousness and inhumanity shown by Iredia’s NTA was unsurpassed by any – may be the response level shown by the agencies so concerned could come close to it. The reader may not have understood the enormity of Iredia’s faux pass if he is not affected by the tragedy. But my believe is that – so long as you are a Nigerian, you must feel the pains of losing 117 compatriots through a combination of factors that might have been avoided if we had a responsible and responsive government. The blame game have already started with each of the agencies involved trying to shift blame to the others and by the time you know what is happening, the late Pilot would be found “guilty” of one failure or the other that resulted in the crash and the lost of lives. We have seen it all before.
But if I may ask, in this era of privatisation and commercialisation, has the Obasanjo’s or the Abebe’s bought the NTA or what? Is the NTA still funded through tax payers’ money or not? I do not begrudge Iredia’s sycophancy to the Obasanjos, but I certainly find exception to his using a publicly funded organisation to pay homilies to a single soul for a whole week, while 117 others, whose families scatter all over the country watch in utter disbelief. If Iredia wants to disgrace himself and the Obasanjos no one should stop him, but he should stop insulting Nigerians with his vulgarity and callousness. Stella’s lost is felt hardest by the Obasanjo and Abebe families the same way 117 individual families lost their dear ones. Able and active men and women who were actively contributing to the growth of the country, most of them coming from duty like the lady from the Federal Ministry of Education who was coming from a UNESCO meeting in France; the late Post Master General who was also on his way from a meeting in Switzerland. There were people like Waziri Mohammed, who has touched lives of several people that I know and most of them are still in deep shock; John Udeka the late Managing Director of ACB International Bank; some young up and coming officers of the Corporate Affairs Commission and so many men and women who doesn’t have any reason to die.
Stella on the other hand consciously took herself to this hospital in Spain knowing the dangers associated with such a surgery; put herself willingly under the surgeon’s knife. She went to the hospital on her free will and may be with the full consent of her husband. Stella wanted to look young but ended up in the morgue – may the good Lord forgive her and I don’t mean to disparage her in death but then the actions of Iredia and those crying crocodile tears make me want to puke. If Tonnie and Obasanjo had taken their time to watch their NTA, they would seen the grieve wrought on thousands by the inertia of the Obasanjo government in responding to crisis. The response to any crisis declared by labour and the civil societies has always been prompt and brutal, but if it comes to response to tragedies and emergencies, their coherence, fastidiousness and efficiency deserts them.
The stories purveyed on Stella’s lifestyle while she was alive doesn’t bear repetition here, suffice it to say that Nigerians are a shameless lot. The same purveyors of the stories are now at the forefront of trying to canonise Stella by changing the music so soon after her demise. They can go ahead and do that, fine by me. But what I find offensive and reprehensible is the use of a publicly funded media organisation to achieve that without regards to the sensibilities of others who equally lost their “first ladies” and “first men” in circumstances more touching than Stella’s. I believe the Obasanjo’s and Abebe’s have enough to pay for airtime on any of the private broadcast media organisation to show-off Stella’s final trip ‘home’ without annoying anyone. Stella’s life should be celebrated, so wished her son; the lives of others too shall be celebrated using the same media Iredia turned over to the Obasanjo’s for the “publicisation” of their grieve. |