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OPINION: Desperate Crowds And Foods Of Death [Monday Lines]

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By Lasisi Olagunju

I died one bright day in 1969 – yes, died; crushed by a motorcyclist. It happened on Ileya Day (Eid el Kabir) in my hometown. I did not know, and still do not know, how it happened. All I know is that I was following my father to the eid praying ground in the morning, then I followed a crowd of other children to cross the road to the other side,…then I woke up in the afternoon, medics all over me, stitching and cleaning. Where I was turned out to be the Baptist Welfare Centre in neighbouring Iree town. A day that was supposed to be a day of feast almost turned grim in our home. For parents of the children who died last Wednesday in Ibadan, and families who lost loved ones on Saturday in Abuja and Okija, Anambra State, this Christmas and the New Year are certain days of mourning. May God comfort them.

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The dead got eaten while looking for what to eat. I pray that the bereaved be healed of their mortal wounds. They do not have my parents’ luck: I came back from the dead, head heavily sutured. The children who went to Basorun in Ibadan on Wednesday last week didn’t come back; they won’t be back, forever. Every eid el Kabir reminds me of my own aborted (abortive) death. For the Ibadan, Abuja and Okija families, every year end henceforth will come with spectral, ghostly memories. What happened is an evergreen tragedy, monumental in all ways.

When a similar crowd crush killed 183 children in a hall in Sunderland, United Kingdom, on 16 June, 1883, one of the survivors contrasted the mood in his family with the atmosphere in unfortunate homes in that city: “In our house there was joy and thanksgiving, and one old neighbour laid his hand on my head and told me that my death had not yet been decreed. But in many homes, there was misery and desolation, many a heart was stricken with woe, and many a mother as she bent in sorrow over a loved one so strangely still (said that) indeed, the ways of God are not as our ways.” William Codling, who managed to escape the horrid incident with his sister, wrote the above in December 1894 (eleven years after the tragedy).

Death existed to kill the aged, but today, it is murdering the young, north, east and west. Why? Fuji music philosopher, Saheed Osupa, asks the same question in a song: “Ikú np’àgbà/ èwo ni t’omodé?/ Ilé ayé mà wá di rúdurùdu.” The world is spoilt. In his ‘Yoruba Responses to The Fear of Death’ (1960), Peter Morton-Williams describes death of the young among the Yoruba as “horrifying, an unnatural calamity.” It is true that what we call àìgboràn- headstrong foolhardiness – sometimes kills, but it is also true that the will of the enemy kills more. The enemy in the context of this death discourse is the Nigerian state. Mass misery was the enemy that processed the disasters of last week.

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Hunger is a very jealous tenant; it habours no neighbour – not the fear of death, not of death itself. If the hungry feared death, they would know that an uncontrolled crowd is a barrel bomb that kills without borders. Hunger was the devil in the fatal gatherings of Ibadan, Abuja and Okija. I blame the lords of the land. On their watch, everyone begs, or rummages the trash can or joins deadly food rallies for IDP rations. Those are the options. The other available option is suicide – and many pursue life today in ways that suggest they do not mind dying as an escape route.

MORE FROM THE AUTHOR: OPINION: Tinubu, Atiku And The Lion’s Share [Monday Lines 2]

In 1883, what was promised the kids of Sunderland were toys and “the greatest treat for children ever given.” In Ibadan last Wednesday, what the children were promised was N5,000 for the first 5,000 of them that showed up. Some mothers heard that and put one plus one together: Two kids meant N10,000; three kids, N15,000. They did the maths and thought it was right to gather and rush their entire kids into that ground of death in search of hope. Many got there as early as 5am – five hours before the event was due to start; some mothers reportedly even slept overnight there with their kids to beat the queue. Some more desperate ones threw their kids across the fence into the already choked and charged school compound, the event venue. It was like feeding their future to the demon of misery. Mr. Oriyomi Hamzat, whose Agidigbo FM radio station partnered with the organizers, says in a trending audio clip: “I saw how people were falling on one another. As I was rescuing those that fell, more people were rushing and stepping on those that were on the ground because of small gifts. I pity that woman, and I pity myself. I will never do this again.”

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In Okija, Anambra State, the promise was rice; in Abuja, it was imprecise ‘palliative.’ The Ibadan, Abuja and Okija gesture of magnanimity unfortunately turned to foods of death; a pledged gift of chickens took whole bulls from many families. In ‘The Gift, and Death, of Blackness,’ Joseph Winters of Duke University, North Carolina, United States, writes about what he calls “the gift of death.” Some gifts become poisonous when wrongly given; they kill. We have become so depraved that we volubly advertise philanthropy. Gordon B. Hancock, in a June 1926 Social Forces article, writes on “the evils which inhere in excessive advertising.” He asks one troubling question: “Is the unlimited sway of advertising compatible with society’s highest good?” Whoever is probing last week’s serial disasters should seek an answer to that question. An effusive promise of gifts on a popular radio station roused several thousands of hungry children and adults to the Ibadan funfair of death. Similarly hyped promises of gifts poured over two thousand school children into Victoria Hall in Sunderland in 1883 – 141 years ago. William Codling, who was quoted above, narrated how the Sunderland disaster happened: “It began something in this wise: A man delivered a handful of bills outside the school doors on the Friday night setting forth the entertainment in glowing terms and we were all wild to go.” And they went. As it turned out, no one left that venue, and all the Nigerian venues of last week, with what was promised. Instead, death, which was not promised, was the harvest. In the UK experience, a whole class of 30 Sunday School children were among those picked up dead from the stampede. In Ibadan, some mothers reportedly lost all they had to the tragedy.

Hunger, or even fear of hunger, push people to plunge into deadly irrationality. On Thursday, 24 October, 1918, eleven women, four children and a police officer died in a stampede at a market in Cairo, Egypt, simply because they feared they wouldn’t get enough cereals to buy. They were not looking for freebies; they died because they scrambled to buy what was scarce.

MORE FROM THE AUTHOR: OPINION: ‘An Enemy Of The People’ [Monday Lines]

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“In the aftermath of tragedies,” writes Ellen Walker in a November, 2022 article, “it’s easy to focus on the assignation of blame. But how well do we understand the causes of crushing crowds?” The piece is on ‘Death by Crowding.’ All probes and available literature on crowd accidents abroad blame the same issues: poor and “inadequate planning, excited crowd, lack of crowd management and a flaw or hazard in a facility” (J. F. Dickie, 1995: 318). We have those factors here compounded viciously by unremitting hunger courtesy of bumbling governance, and a colada of existential concerns.

Grim and tragic as last week was, will it be the last? We pray it is so, but it may not be unless we check the causes and yank off the throttle, drivers of such tragedies. In ‘The Life of Reason’, Spanish American philosopher, George Santayana, warns that: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

A passage in J. F. Dickie’s ‘Major Crowd Catastrophes’ published in 1995 suggests exactly that. Dickie writes about the Sunderland disaster of 1883 with 183 fatalities, the London crowd crush of 1943 with 173 fatalities; Bolton of 1946 with 33 fatalities; Glasgow of 1971 with 66 fatalities and Sheffield of 1989 with 96 fatalities. He then sculptures those crowd-crushing disasters into a dizzying revolving door of calamities. Because man does not learn from his bad experiences, they come in repeated times like Wole Soyinka’s Abiku. Dickie notes that “the Ibrox stand incident of 1902 in Glasgow reoccurred at Bastia in 1992 where the potential for an enormous tragedy existed. The crushing accident at Bolton in 1946 has a striking similarity with the Hillsborough disaster. The Sunderland catastrophe of 1883 is similar to the Bethnal Green incident of 1943 which repeated itself on a smaller scale in New York in 1992.”

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We have them in Nigeria here too. I quote a BBC report of the Ibadan stampede and its predecessors: “Nigeria is grappling with its worst economic crisis in a generation, which explains why more than 10,000 people reportedly turned up for the event. There have been several similar incidents this year. In March, two female students were crushed to death at the Nasarawa State University, Keffi, near the capital Abuja, when a rice distribution programme by the state governor caused a crowd surge. At least 23 people were injured. Three days later in the northern state of Bauchi, at least seven people died in another crush when a philanthropist and businessman was giving handouts of 5,000 naira. Earlier in February, five people were reported killed in Lagos when the Nigerian Customs Service auctioned seized bags of rice. A crowd surge for bags of rice being auctioned for about $7:00 led to the trampling to death of five people with dozens more injured.” The BBC did that recap on Wednesday, four days before the twin tragedies in Abuja in the north and Okija in the east – a perfect completion of the usual pan-Nigerian triangle of evil.

I spend some of my valuable time watching power and its drama. This past week, I bit my lips watching the indiscretion of the president’s men organizing a voluptuous boat regatta for him in Lagos in spite of the Ibadan disaster. I shook my head at the politics of a last-minute cancellation of that boat regatta not because of Ibadan but because of similar disasters in the north and in the east. The president and his Lagos men were almost echoing Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar: “What touches us ourselves shall be last served.”

MORE FROM THE AUTHOR: OPINION: Of Kings, King Kong And Honour

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The president has been busy with statements after statements mourning the dead. He needs to do more than issuing condolence messages. PR stunts of cancellation of a boat regatta won’t turn back hungry crowds from journeys of death. The president should convince himself that his policies are not life-friendly; they kill the poor and impoverish the rich. I hope he knows this and believes this and makes amends. He is his number one problem; the second are those who sing Emperor Nero’s anthem while his Rome burns. Fawning fans of power will insist that the president and his policies have clean hands in this mass death matter. They will talk of palliatives of the past as proof of the president’s humanity. Unfortunately, as Zimbabweans say, “you cannot tell a hungry child that you gave him food yesterday.”

Defenders of power would point at pre-May 2023 crowd-crush disasters in this country. They would say they happened before this regime; they would cite the several deadly stampedes outside Nigeria across decades and centuries. The Muslim among them would cite Quran 63:11: “Never will Allah delay a soul when its time has come.” The Christian among them would quote the Bible, Ecclesiastes 1:9: “There is no new thing under the sun.” Yes, a stampede in a Chicago theatre in 1903 killed 602; another in a Moscow stadium in 1982 killed 340. A stampede in Mecca in 1990 killed 1,425; many more follow-up crowd crush disasters in Saudi Arabia claimed hundreds of lives. Further down history in 1863, a Church stampede in Santiago, Chile, killed 2,000 persons. Regime backers here will use these figures to scent the arse of their palace. They won’t think of one distinguishing fact: in all those places, the disasters were not because the people were starving and dying. Even the Egypt food scarcity that birthed the disaster of 1918 was not because government was unfeeling; it was because a world war was ongoing. Here, there is no war, yet people are dying in droves as if there is a war here.

Kings and presidents should pause their greed, rethink their policies and create some space for the people. They can remain big without being “superfluous and lust-dieted.” They can let “distribution undo excess” so that “each man (will) have enough.” The words in quote here are from Shakespeare’s King Lear. And, ‘enough’ in every culture here means life’s basics: food, shelter, clothing and hope of advancement. It is only when the “houseless heads and unfed sides”, when the “poor naked wretches” are weaned of their want that the country can have peace and stop crying over spilt milk of fatal stampedes. In whatever remedial steps we may take, I see a need for urgency. We need to act fast, otherwise – and this is my conclusion here – the next stampede may not spare the elite.

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Idahosa Optimistic Shaibu Will Perform As National Sports Institute DG

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The Edo State deputy governor, Hon. Dennis Idahosa, has expressed optimism that his predecessor in office, Hon. Philip Shaibu will excel in his new role as Director General of the National Institute for Sports (NIS).

The deputy governor expressed his optimism during the Thanksgiving Mass to celebrate the appointment at St. Paul Catholic Church in Benin on Sunday.

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Idahosa, who appreciated President Bola Tinubu for the appointment, said Shaibu will bring to bear on the new job his experience as an astute sports administrator.

READ ALSO: Okpebholo Prioritises Security, Workers Welfare, Says Idahosa

We are indeed grateful for what God has done. We will continue to thank God on his behalf, because, he has served our state.

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“Now, God has given him the opportunity to serve the nation. We will continue to pray for him for a successful tenure,” he stated.

The former deputy governor appreciated Idahosa for according him the honour with his physical attendance at the Thanksgiving Mass.

He assured the state of his readiness to effectively be a good ambassador effectively by working to reposition of the NIS in line with the renwew hope agenda of the President.

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I will try my best to bring the institute back to life. I will ensure that the reason for setting up the NIS is achieved,” he stated.

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Falana Slams Government Over Failure To Prosecute Suspected Killers In Benue

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Human rights lawyer and senior advocate of Nigeria, Femi Falana (SAN), has criticized the Federal and Benue State Governments for consistently failing to prosecute suspects arrested in connection with ongoing violent attacks across Benue State.

In a statement issued under the platform of the Alliance on Surviving COVID-19 and Beyond (ASCAB), which he chairs, Falana lamented that although hundreds of suspects have been arrested over the years for crimes ranging from illegal possession of firearms to mass killings and kidnapping, most of them are never charged or brought to trial.

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The legal luminary’s reaction follows President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s recent visit to Benue, during which he directed the Nigeria Police Force to arrest and prosecute all those involved in the latest wave of violence in the state. However, Falana described the president’s order as potentially symbolic, pointing out that previous arrests had not led to convictions or justice for victims.

READ ALSO:Benue Crisis: I’m Happy Nigerians Rebuked You – VDM Slams Billionaire Kiddwaya For Donation Appeal

Falana also berated the Chief of Defence Staff, General Christopher Musa, for alleging that residents of Yelwata community provided shelter for the killers. He described the statement as an attempt to shift blame onto victims instead of addressing the systemic failures of security and governance.

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Providing a timeline of law enforcement actions, Falana stated:

On December 30, 2024, the Benue State Commissioner of Police, Mr. Hassan Yabanet, announced the arrest of 273 suspects involved in capital crimes, along with the recovery of 20 firearms and 51 rounds of ammunition.

On January 17, 2024, Police spokesperson Olumuyiwa Adejobi revealed that an illegal firearms factory had been uncovered in Benue. Two suspects—Friday Aduduakambe and Iorwashima Iornyume—were arrested, and a cache of weapons, including nine locally made pistols and one unfinished AK-47, was seized.

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READ ALSO: Benue Killings: I Expect Arrests, Tinubu Directs Security Chiefs

On April 17, 2025, Governor Hyacinth Alia disclosed that three herdsmen were arrested over the killing of 11 people in the Otobi community, Otukpo Local Government Area.

On June 19, 2025, Community Volunteer Guards apprehended three suspected kidnappers at the Otukpo motor park with ransom money collected from their victims.

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According to Falana, between January and June 2025 alone, dozens of violent crime suspects have been arrested, including 43 suspected killers in the last 10 days. Despite these arrests, no significant prosecutions have been reported.

It is undoubtedly clear that the authorities have continued to treat suspected killers in Benue State like sacred cows,” he said. “The Attorney-General and Commissioner for Justice of Benue State, Mr. Fidelis Mnyim, must take immediate steps to ensure that justice is served.”

Falana stressed that the right to life, guaranteed under Section 33 of the 1999 Constitution, is meaningless unless the state acts decisively to punish those who violate it.

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He warned that unless concrete action is taken, the ongoing culture of impunity will only worsen the bloodshed and erode public trust in the rule of law.

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Troops Nab 8 Kidnap Suspects, Rescue 2 Victims In Kwara

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Troops of the 22 Armoured Brigade, deployed at the Forward Operation Base (FOB) Patigi, in Kwara have nabbed eight suspected kidnappers and rescued two victims.

This is contained in a statement signed by Lt. Stephen Nwankwo, Acting Assistant Director, Army Public Relations of the Brigade in Ilorin on Sunday.

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Acting on credible intelligence, troops launched a tactical operation on Saturday, targeting a hideout on the outskirts of Latandaji Village in Patigi Local Government Area.

READ ALSO:27 Feared Dead In Kwara Boat Mishap

“During the engagement, troops encountered mild resistance, but swiftly subdued the criminals with superior firepower,” he said.

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Nwankwo said that the operation led to the rescue of two kidnap victims, identified as Amos Moses and Philip Michael, while eight suspected kidnappers were arrested.

He, however, said that one Mohammed Mohammed sustained gunshot wounds during the exchange of fire and had been taken to hospital for medical attention.

The brigade spokesman said that further operational exploits in the area led to the recovery of two motorcycles and two expended cartridge shells, believed to be used by the suspects.

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READ ALSO:Yahoo Boy Jailed, Loses N124m, Benz In Kwara

All arrested individuals are currently in military custody for preliminary investigation and will be handed over to relevant authorities for prosecution,” Nwankwo said.

He said that the operation underscores the Nigerian Army’s unwavering commitment to ensure safety of lives and property across the country.

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We urge members of the public to continue providing actionable intelligence to security forces in order to dismantle criminal networks.

“The Nigerian Army remains resolute in its mission to safeguard communities and restore lasting peace in all regions of deployment,” he said.

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