The unnamed woman had just given birth to a baby five days before. Her body was still wet as Yoruba says of mothers who just underwent the pangs of labour and delivery. Pains must still be ricocheting round her navel and underneath. Ex-Queen of the Ooni of Ife, Prophetess Naomi Silekunola, and an Ibadan-based broadcaster, Oriyomi Hamzat, had promised her and her baby free food. This was done in a blast of publicity inviting her kid and 4999 other children to a funfair. The event was slated for Islamic High School, Bashorun, a suburb of Ibadan. The organizers said it would be an unprecedented funfair of freebies never given before. Hamzat’s Agidigbo Radio, based in the capital of Oyo State, is undoubtedly the darling of the common people. It is top of the radar traffic-wise. Hamzat popularized the medium as one that tends to the needs of the common people and discusses issues agitating their minds.
Scholars have posited that everyday matters woven round the existence of the ordinary man are s3x, cheap s3x, poverty, food, crime, alcohol, divorce, gambling and s3xual violence. Matters that are queer, uncommon and mind-boggling, which cannot be divorced from those everyday issues, are given pride of place on Agidigbo radio. Listeners gravitate towards the radio in their multiple of thousands. It is on Agidigbo you would hear stories of a less than 20-year-old lady whose pregnancy is being contested by two artisan boys who are either bricklayers or mechanics. Salacious details that evoke laughter and tears ooze out of the radio. Hamzat himself, renowned for the phrase, “E bá wa gbé’nu sí mic” – kindly draw closer to the microphone – popularized that phrase. It acquired a life of its own, becoming synonymous with someone being under public scrutiny. Or who is enmeshed in petty misdemeanor. It is no wonder that in the Nigerian Broadcasting Service (NBS) rating, Agidigbo is No 1 in Oyo State.
The unnamed woman heard or was told about the alliance by Queen Naomi and Hamzat to provide succor for her newborn baby. Not minding her wet body, she strapped her fragile newborn baby to her back and headed for Bashorun. By 5am, the venue was already bursting at its seams with persons, most of whom were kids. Did some wicked people land Queen Naomi and Hamzat in trouble spiritually? This is a question being asked in some quarters.
If Hamzat and Olori Silekunola emerge from their current travails unscathed, they may learn to consult our Mothers’ face in subsequent ventures. It is said that such gathering of a large crowd involving women and children is sacred and must be looked at from the lens of teleology. In his “Òṣòròmọ̀nìgà: Representations of witchcraft in Yoruba films,” Nordic Journal of African Studies – Vol 30 No 2 (2021) Olusegun Soetan of the African Studies Department, Pennsylvania State University, venerates the place and value of witchcraftcy which he called àjẹ́ism. Òṣòròmọ̀nìgà, said the scholar, is one of the many cognomens of witches in Ifá divination systems and praise poetry. According to him, “among the many supernatural phenomena in Africa is witchcraft. (It) is both cultural and sacred, and its practices suggest that specific individuals have supernatural powers that enable them to bend physical and cosmic laws.” Known as àjẹ́ in the Yoruba society, Igbo call it amoosu while, in the Maka tradition of Cameroon, it is known as gris-gris. Dauda Epo-Akara, a notable traditional musician, chanting the cognomen of witches, once said that if a cook who is preparing to pound yam fails to factor the Mothers into its preparation, the pounded yam would be destroyed by myriads of tiny unpounded yam specks called “kókó” while anyone preparing a meal of àmàla who fails to factor the Mothers into its preparation will have the àmàlà’s otherwise solid morsel become as watery as pap. Ulli Beier however disclaimed this widely held notion of Àjé as inaccurate. In a 1958 piece, he said Àjé “represents rather the mystic powers of womanhood in their more dangerous destructive aspect.” Perhaps, in concert with Queen Silekunola’s Ifè palace enemies and Hamzat’s traducers in and out of the microphone, the Mothers ganged up to do the duo in last Wednesday. After all, Chief Ebenezer Obey, the Juju music great, once sang that those who pound evil for their fellow beings advertize no physical pestle, nor mortar – “agún’bàjé ò l’ódó”.
Sorry, I digressed. By the time the unnamed mother newly-delivered of a baby arrived the school venue of the event, it was brimming with a never-seen-before gathering of people. The child later became one of the 35 people trampled to death in the scramble for food. The baby returned to its maker without being given the traditional seven-day name. The BBC, in its report of the tragedy, said the 35 children “died in a crush after thousands turned up on the promise of free food.” Some people were reported to have slept overnight at the school gate because they did not want to miss the chance to be among the first 5000 to access the free food. Many attempted to force their way through, some parents attempted to scale the fence and some mothers threw their children inside the fence while they climbed the walls.
So, this past week, Ibadan wept. Everyone, even anyone, who was as unfeeling as to be capable of eating the barbecued bony and fleshless heads of vulture and tortoise, must have wept with Ibadan. The agony reverberated throughout the rusty-roof city. Mothers wept uncontrollably. Tears became an infection, afflicting, at supersonic speed, eyes of anyone who heard of the tragedy. But the deed had been done. Thirty-five lifeless bodies of the glory of Nigeria’s tomorrow lay in a heap. Someone showed me a gory photo of the dead children. It reminds me of Palestinians’ bodies killed in airstrikes by Israel, laid in a heap waiting for the Salat al-Janazah prayer for the dead. It was as if the trampled-to-death children of Ibadan were asleep. You couldn’t see death on their faces, except that life had escaped their nostrils. Mothers wailed, rolling on the dusty floor of Islamic High School’s football field where death chose to conduct its dawn raid. A few minutes after the raid; after the small bodies had been taken in huge number to freeze inside the mortuary, Death’s mementoes lay on the football field. They had been abandoned in panic in the melee and now serve as reminder of the human loss. They range from children’s sandals, torn books and cracked school desks.
The lamentable deaths of children in Ibadan have since been enveloped by politics and doublespeak. Yes, there was acute negligence on the part of the organizers of the children’s funfair event. From tissues of information available, not only didn’t they seek government’s permission, safety measures were cavalierly or nil-observed. Their defence that they expected 5000 children but at conservative estimate, between 7500 and 10,000 children and parents attended, was wonky.
Among others, President Bola Tinubu, according to his media chief, “expressed sadness over the tragic incident” as usual, “extended his condolences” and cried that “this is a deeply painful moment for the entire nation.” He said he was “determined to prevent similar tragedies” and “uncover the truth behind this tragedy as “It is imperative to determine whether negligence or deliberate actions were involved” because “Our children’s safety and well-being remain paramount” and “No event should ever compromise their safety or take precedence over their lives.” Bla bla bla.
But, as my people say, until the lion kills the Chief Hunter, the war between hunters and the crew in the wild could not be said to have ended; nor can the dance come to an end when the donkey has not farted. Shorn of politics and hypocritical talk, Tinubu is vicariously liable for the death of the Ibadan 35 kids. His accomplices are those glib-talking aides and party buffs who have deodorized the sufferings of Nigerian people in the last 19 months.
As I have adumbrated ceaselessly, while the Tinubu government claims the president is on a reform binge, he has succeeded in killing multiple of hundreds of our countrymen and sent hundreds others onto the streets, ravaged by depression and whispering to space as they occupy a world of their own. Thousands die for inability to procure drugs for simple ailments. Many families and homes are embroiled in social crises as a result of a huge emasculation of husbands, breadwinners’ manhood. Wives are lured into prostitution due to their husbands’ economic dis-masculinity. Children meet their waterloo in the process of augmenting their parents’ meager daily breads. Yes, reforms, all over the world, are painful exercises but Tinubu’s isn’t merely painful, it is cruel and bears the visor of Dracula. Yet, the reformists wallop in ostentation, mindless and Satanic corruption and flaunt their loots in our faces.
Thus, when Tinubu and his minders try to push the blame of last Wednesday’s tragedy in Ibadan to “crowd control breakdown” and vowing to avert similar tragedies, they look at the ailment and not its root cause. There will be many of such tragedies to come unless Tinubu stands up from his fanny and administers Nigeria like a committed leader. In the same vein, stampedes during food distribution were said to have led to the deaths of at least 30 people on Saturday. While 20 people reportedly got killed in Okija, Ihiala Local Government Area of Anambra state, 10 others died at the Holy Trinity Catholic Church, Maitama area of Abuja. Handled by individual and private institutions in both venues, the food distributions were done to ease economic hardships as Christmas celebrations get nearer.
In March of this year, a similar stampede happened in Bauchi State which claimed the lives of an eight-year old girl and six other people. Like the Ibadan tragedy, the victims, alongside others, had stormed the house of a businessman who invited residents to collect N5,000 that is about $3 USD. In October of this year, 153 people were reportedly burnt to ashes while they were scooping fuel from an overturned fuel tanker which exploded. The tanker had been coming from Kano State and heading towards Nguru when it overturned. Granted that Nigerians are used to a life of freebies, no matter the risks that ensconce those freebies, Nigeria’s grueling economic realities have quadruped the number of Nigerians who would take the risk without considering its downsides. No sermonization of fair play, decency or normalcy can penetrate the deaf ears of the hungry.
In the midst of this, all Tinubu’s APC is bothered about is winning elections. While the bodies of the 35 dead were in the morgue, on a visit to the party’s National Working Committee in Abuja, Minister of Power, Adebayo Adelabu, called on the National Chairman Abdullahi Ganduje, to replicate the party’s recent electoral banditry in Edo and Ondo States as blueprint to reclaim Oyo State. Ganduje himself, like a skunk-drunk sailor, had said his party would create chaos in Osun and Oyo states to snatch and run with the states. Trust politicians, they think not about lives but the next election.
If Tinubu needed to hear – and perchance is bothered – these calamities, in the words of Bob Marley, are becoming a natural mystic that is associated with excruciating hunger and suffering. Both, the Tinubu government brought upon Nigerians. “Many more will have to suffer; many more will have to die,” Marley warned. You can shawl the abdication of responsibility of the government in beautiful-sounding reform epithets. The truth is, figuratively speaking, this government’s inhuman reform gambling, which my people call “èyí je, èyí ò je,” was what served the fresh bodies of 35 innocent Nigerian kids as Christmas season meal to devour before the rapacious incisors of Death.
I wish you a merry and prosperous Christmas, longsuffering people of Nigeria, in the midst of this parlous season.
Festus Adedayo is a renowed columnist with Nigerian Tribune