THE ABULE ADO EXPLOSION, DREAMS LOST AND HUMANITY REGAINED

The first I heard about the explosion which happened on Sunday the 15^th of March in the Abule Ado area of Lagos State was via a text message from a friend which had advised that the area should be avoided because of a pipeline explosion. My first thought was, oh no! Not another explosion, when will the vandals learn? To be honest, I didn’t give too much thought to it again, I only hoped there wasn’t any fatality of misguided people who risk their lives and die in the process of scooping fuel. It wasn’t until very much later in the evening that I got to see on the news, the magnitude of the explosion and I got to hear that this time, the cause of the explosion might not have been pipeline vandalism that has come to form part of our sad story in this country.

Picture of Emmanuel & Chisom Udoakanobi, newly married couple courtesy of Vanguard Newspaper.

Since Sunday when the explosion happened, different media outlets have come out with different figures/numbers of casualties and fatalities. As at this morning, the Guardian newspaper, reported that 23 fatalities have been recorded as a result of the explosion. Many more people got injured and are being treated at a naval hospital not too far from the area of the explosion.

Something I noticed though in the midst of the gloom and darkness of the aftermath of the explosion, first in the much, (perhaps rightly?) vilified, social media, and now in the traditional electronic media, is the fact names and faces are being given to some of the victims of the explosion. The names we have heard and the faces we have seen certainly are very few compared with the numbers of people we have been told died from the explosion, but I definitely feel the fact we have heard names and seen faces, and in fact have a story or two about a few of the people killed in the explosion, is a starting point.

You might wonder why hearing the names of the people killed in the explosion and hearing their stories is so important. If you have followed events since Boko Haram started killing people en masse in Nigeria, all we are ever given are the numbers of people killed. We were never told the names of the dead, whether they had dreams and aspirations, and if any of them did, what those dreams and aspirations were, before their lives were brutally cut short by unfeeling terrorists. The story is the same with deaths recorded from accidents, from building collapses across the country, from deaths stemming from farmers/herders clashes etc. We never got to hear how the lives of the loved ones they left behind changed after these deaths. All we have always been told are numbers. No more. Just numbers that took the humanity from the dead and rendered them as no more than mere statistics, corpses.

To be sure, as someone who is developing a huge interest in numbers and statistics, numbers are very important. Studying numbers and analyzing them can go a long way in detecting problems and in knowing the kind of solution that can be employed. However, where people are killed either by deliberate or negligent actions or omissions to do certain important things, it is of the utmost importance that people killed by such actions or omissions to act are given flesh by the telling of their stories. By making their names public and through the telling of their stories including their dreams, aspirations and hopes for the future, we are made to realize that they may not have been too different from those of us still living. It is only through the telling of the experiences of the dead while they lived, that we really get to feel their loss much the same or at least similar to the sense of loss we would feel, had they been personally known to us. It is also through hearing their stories that we can make the decisions individually and collectively, to be better, to do better and to demand better from those charged with tasks which affect our lives.

It is in the light of the above that the celebration of the life of Rev, Sis. Dr. Henrietta Alokha, the Principal/Administrator of Bethlehem Girls College, who died in the process of ensuring the girls entrusted in her care by their parents, lived, need to be commended and amplified. It is also for this reason that we need to hear more about the newly married couple, Emmanuel and Chisom Udoakanobi (the latter, reportedly, a first class graduate of accounting), who were reportedly expecting their first child when they met with their untimely deaths. It is because the people affected by the explosion are way more than just numbers, that many of us rejoice upon hearing of the rescue of the 3 year old Favour from beneath the rubble of buildings affected by the explosion.

It is so we can properly mourn the loss of all those killed and sympathise and pray for those who survived but probably lost properties and livelihoods and for us to resolve and take action towards stopping recurrence of this kind of tragedy that we need to hear the names, see the faces and listen to the stories of all those killed in the explosion. We need to see the faces of the dead, so we can all appreciate that our individual actions and or inactions have consequences for ourselves as well as for others. At the end of the day, numbers are important, but our humanity given flesh by the stories of the humans who perish because of our actions or inactions, is way more important.