Post-mortem as a national hobby

There is however no doubt that our security agencies have made some efforts of recent to secure the nation but their efforts are essentially ‘wisdom after event’ schemes which have to give way to proactive strategies that can prevent problems rather than seeking to cure them after they have impacted negatively on the people.  The […]

There is however no doubt that our security agencies have made some efforts of recent to secure the nation but their efforts are essentially ‘wisdom after event’ schemes which have to give way to proactive strategies that can prevent problems rather than seeking to cure them after they have impacted negatively on the people.  The way we panic over different disasters seems to suggest that post mortem is our hobby as a nation.  Assuming that it is the guerilla warfare nature of criminals that prevents us from overcoming bombings, armed robbery and kidnappings, how do we explain the nation’s attitude to natural disasters?  In February last year for example, the Nigerian Meteorological Agency (NIMET) warned that there would be surplus rains in the year which would result in coastal flooding and erosion in several parts of the country. We did nothing until heavy flooding a few months later nearly sacked places like Ibadan and Lagos which were among areas specified by the agency as likely to be affected. In Ibadan, some 102 people made up mostly of children and elderly women according to the Nigerian Red Cross perished in the disaster while the nation’s premier university in the city lost valuable irreplaceable items worth over 10 billion naira to the floods. In Katsina, the state emergency relief agency confirmed the loss of a whole village and its crop fields to the flood while 2,000 persons were rendered homeless. In neighbouring Jigawa State, flooding reportedly submerged 25 villages, displaced 7,000 people and washed away 3,000 hectares of crops.   In Cross river state, flooding destroyed houses and farmlands worth more than N600 million destroyed. All of these could have been prevented or minimized if only we had listened and acted on the warnings of the experts

Air disaster which is our latest source of worry cannot also be distanced from the same factor-the nation’s love for post mortem. Last Sunday, a commercial airline flight crashed into a densely populated suburb of Lagos. The accident which killed no less than 160 people is the nation’s worst air disaster in recent years.  President Goodluck Jonathan immediately declared three days of national mourning and ordered an investigation into the cause of the accident. He was indeed at the site of the crash with some members of the National Assembly. Later at the Federal Executive Council meeting, which was dedicated to the crash issue, the President set up a nine-man panel to probe the accident and undertake an immediate review of domestic airlines as well as the total auditing of every aircraft registered in the country. The panel which has six months to submit its report is also to assess the financial health of airlines operating within the country and outline actions to be taken to improve air safety in Nigeria. The President then made a solemn promise that “I assure all Nigerians and the international community that the investigations which I have ordered will be very thorough. Let me warn that where clear dereliction of duty is established, firm action will be taken.”

All these are no doubt good moves. The only snag is that there is nothing new about them. We have heard them for more often than is rational. Another thing that normally plays itself out like a ritual at a time like this is the fervent search for the black box of a crashed aircraft. Again, while nothing is ordinarily wrong with that, it however calls for some questions. First, of what benefit is the black box to the passengers, their families and those killed in the house into which the Dana aircraft crashed last Sunday? Second, if the argument is that the box can throw light on the cause of the crash and thus assist us to prevent future crashes, how have the black boxes of the previous crashes of the ADC, Bellview, Sosoliso etc helped the nation?  Indeed, what have we done with the reports of previous probe panels on air crashes in the country? While searching for the answer to the question, I ran into a statement credited to Princess Stella Oduah our Minister of Aviation “ that all the reports of past air crashes, the Sosoliso, ADC, etc are ready and when we get the proper approval to release to the public we will do so”. Well, am yet to know who is to give the minister proper approval- is it the African Union? Who set up the panels and who received the reports? These, no doubt, are questions that can create credibility problems for government. Thus, rather than rely on leadership to take appropriate actions people violently air their suggestions. One Niger Delta group showed this during the week when it, on its own, decided that Dana air should be out rightly banned from Nigeria. The group alleged that the same airline’s aircraft which crashed last Sunday, had due to loss of hydraulic, made an emergency landing at the Murtala Muhammad International Airport, Lagos on May 10, 2012. If this allegation is true and the regulators did not call the airline to order at that time, what is going on now is fruitless post mortem.