Not Again...

Nigeria mourns. Another plane crash, the fourth in one year - three claiming about a hundred souls each, and the fourth, (a small plane) claiming about a dozen of Nigeria's finest military officers.

Bellview Airlines Crash: Saturday October 22, 2005 117 casualties

Sosoliso Airlines Crash: Saturday December 10, 2005 108 casualties (60 were students of the Loyola Jesuit College in Abuja)

Nigerian Air Force Crash: Monday, September 17, 2006 13 casualties (Senior Military Officers)

ADC Airlines Crash: Sunday October 29, 2006 96 casualties (Next week, November 6, it will be ten years since another ADC airlines crash, this time in the marshy waters of Ejinrin, killing all 143 aboard.)

Beyond the statistics and the lists of distinguished victims and the apportioning of blame and the press conferences and the investigations and misinvestigations, nothing in these tragedies is as touching as the personal stories and details of the lives that have been lost - that final phone call, that last sighting, the goodbye kiss just before boarding, the final promise, the dream now floating ownerless, the many ironies embedded in the sequences of actions in the final days/hours of those lives, the final moments in the plane as it reached (ADC in this case) - in vain - for the skies in what is perhaps one of the shortest flights ever in history - less than a minute by all accounts.

I personally knew only one person in that crash, Dr A.Y.A Haruna, Consultant Psychiatrist at the Yaba Psychiatric Hospital, Lagos. He was on his way to Sokoto to take up his (brand-new) appointment as the Medical Director of the Federal Neuropsychiatric Hospital, Sokoto. Monday would have been his first day in that position, but he never made it to Sokoto...

The papers since Monday have been filled with the stories... May all the souls of the departed rest in perfect peace.