Fate, faith and mass murder in Ikoyi

A little bird just whispered to me, as I sat to pen this, that in Lagos State alone, more than 200 people had lost their lives in 145 building collapses in 13 years without a single conviction! I   rebuked the bird, arguing: that could only happen in the jungle, not even in a Banana country. The bird just chirruped and flew away. Then the reality dawn on me. Hey, excuse me buddies: I just remembered this is Nigeria where anything goes. Nobody pays for anything here. Laws are made to be broken with impunity and, the higher or well-heeled you are, the easier it is for you to get away with genocide not to talk of “a small incident which claimed just a few souls”. Our nation is a joke told over chilled bottles of kainkain and isiewu at beer parlours by jesters and charlatans!. This Ikoyi mass murder will not be an exception. Second base joor!

Ayanmo is destiny. The elders say no medicine can change it. Africans are not necessarily superstitious; the Black Race is simply realistic. There are certain things that are ordained by the cosmic and no matter how mortals try, they are simply immutable. Superstition is not limited to the African race. All humans defer to one celestial power or the other. In 445 BC, a certain Greek playwright, Aeschylus, who was nicknamed “Father of Tragedy”, received a prophecy that he would die by a falling object hitting him on the head. The great tragedian devised a means of making a lie of the prophecy. For days, he decided to stay outside his home. He chose an open space, where there was no single object above him. He survived till the last day of the prediction. Just when Aeschylus thought the calamity was over, tragedy struck. How did it happen? An eagle had caught a tortoise as a prey. As it is characteristic of eagles, that particular eagle clawed on the tortoise, looking for a rock, where it could smash the tortoise and break its shell, to make a meal of the flesh. Fate took the eagle to where Aeschylus was sitting. Now, Aeschylus was  bald-headed. Seeing the shining bald head, the eagle thought it had spotted a rock. Using all its strength, after soaring further higher, the eagle smashed the tortoise on Aeschylus’ head. End of story. The playwright died before he knew what killed him. His destiny of death by a falling object was fulfilled. That is fate!

In October 2014, in far away Turkey, a 13-year old boy, Heval Yildirim, was playing with his mates outside his father’s house. His father, Mehmet, had brought home a big ram for the Sallah feast and had the sacrificial ram tethered on the roof of the family house. Fate again caused the ram to make the last dash to escape death. In doing so, it fell directly on  young Yildirim’s head. Both the ram and the boy died. The young Yildirim died not because he went to the roof top to play with the ram as children are wont to do during Sallah. His destiny was that he would accompany a sacrificial ram to the great beyond.

We have yet another story of Sarah Bean, who was set to get married to her boyfriend, Lance Johnson. In September 2014. She was on a stroll for lunch with her boyfriend some few metres away from her South Loop, Chicago home, when a metal from the 1874-built Second Presbyterian Church, chipped off the wall of the ancient church and hit her on the head. The 34-year old mother of two died on the spot and fate truncated her envisaged honeymoon with her heartthrob. Incidentally, the particular church had on two different occasions, in 2007 and 2011, failed inspection tests. Nobody paid attention to those failings because destiny had proposed that on a particular day, a certain Sarah Bean must meet her maker by the error of an inspectorate division. Again, Fate!.

Back home in Nigeria, Onyinye Enekwe, a 26-year-old new employee had gone on an inspection duty with Femi Osibona, her boss and owner of the construction company, Fourscore Homes Limited, to the ill-fated 21-storey serviced apartment on the high brow Gerard Road, Ikoyi, Lagos on November 1, 2021. Onyinye, who joined the company barely a week earlier, was also set to marry in December. That morning, she took some selfies in the building and sent them to her loved ones. Then destiny came calling. The 21-storey structure sank on her head and her boss’, who she was detailed as  Personal Assistant to. The collapsed structure put an end to Onyinye’s dreams of a high-paying job and a future happy home. She did no wrong by getting employed in Fourscore Homes Limited, that is the dream of any graduate. Osibona too did no wrong by employing her as a PA. Fate just decided that the duo must depart mother earth the same day and time. No ‘Jupiter’ could have stopped that.

What about Oyindamola Zainab Sanni,  26-year-old member of the National Youth Service Corps (NYSC), who was initially posted to the slaughter slab called Maiduguri, Borno State? Drawing “sense” from other corps members, who Boko Haram had killed up north, Oyindamola, with the support of her mother, did the needful, to avoid death in the hands of the intractable killer squad by seeking redeployment to Lagos. After her orientation in Borno State, the budding young lady came back to Lagos and was posted to Fourscore Homes Limited for her Primary Assignment. Destiny knew that Oyindamola would go to meet her maker on November 1, 2021. Fate also predestined that the young lady would not die by the bullets of Boko Haram. Fate prepared her departure for the 21-storey building in Ikoyi. She only helped fate by seeking her own redeployment to Lagos. Blame her not! I can also not imagine my child being sent on NYSC assignment to Borno of all places, where, even the indigenes, are seeking refuge somewhere else.

If you don’t consider these  cases as products of fate, let us examine yet another victim of the Ikoyi disaster. Wale Bob-Oseni, according to the reports credited to a foremost pen pusher, Dele Momodu, was a friend to Osibona, the owner of the fallen Ikoyi edifice. Bob-Oseni  was on his way to the Murtala Muhammed International Airport, Lagos, en-route the United States of America, when his buddy, Osibona, called him and requested that he stopped over at the Ikoyi site to see the level of development of the terraces. We all have such friends, who, even when we are at the point of performing our conjugal benevolence, can put a call across and pronto, we would halt that all-important marital duty to heed the call. That was what Bob-Oseni did. He stopped over at the Ikoyi 21-storey building as requested, but fate stopped him from making any further journey on earth. We may want to ask: why did he not give the excuse of missing his flight? How come he was not trapped in one of those Lagos’ notorious traffic logjams to avert his untimely death in the collapsed building? Questions and questions can be asked ad infinitum. But, the reality is, fate does not respond to   queries. Destiny cannot be interrogated. Bob-Oseni was destined, from day one, to go in  company with his buddy, Osibona just as Odewale, the protagonist in Ola Rotimi’s The gods are not to blame,  was destined to kill his own father and marry his own mother! Try as he did by fleeing from those he thought were his parents, his flight was but another of fate’s ways of speeding up the fulfilment of the curse of Oedipus. No flight scheduled by the late Bob-Oseni could have stopped that.

Beyond fate and or destiny, which we cannot question, another phenomenon, which led to the November 1, 2021 disaster in Ikoyi is  FAITH. The 21-storey building collapsed around 2.30pm on that faithful Monday. Some three hours later,  a letter surfaced on the social media, indicating that the November 1 calamity had been waiting in the wings. A certain Prowess Engineering Limited, believed to be the Structural Consultant to Fourscore Limited, wrote to withdraw its services. In the letter dated 20th February 2020, and endorsed by  Murtala Olawale, Managing Director, the engineering consultancy firm, wrote that it was withdrawing its service because “we no longer share the same vision with you as our client in terms of how the project is being executed”.

Not done, the firm penned again: “We can guarantee the integrity of the first  two buildings and also works done up to the fourth floor of the third building supervised by us provided specifications have been met in terms of the required concrete strength. this we do not have control over as we do not have the  concrete tube test result  for each stage  of the building till date”. the firm went ahead to exonerate itself from any culpability for any other “construction errors that may have occurred overtime on the project”. to cap it all, prowess engineering limited requested that its name and logo be “removed from the project board” and asked that the building owners  inform all “necessary approving authorities of our withdrawal from the project”.

A layman’s inference from the letter above is that as far back as February 2020, when the calamitous Ikoyi edifice was still at the fourth floor,  the structural consultants knew that what was being packaged was a catastrophe that would surely happen. by simple arithmetic, after the consultancy firm had withdrawn its services because it could no longer guarantee the integrity of the building, the owners added 17 more floors to a structure which concrete tube test result was unknown!

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Why would anyone do such a crazy thing? I answer here: faith! Shortly after the above letter was circulated, another video showed up, where Osibona was seen with some gyrating gospel singers, led by one Adeyinka Alaseyori of Oniduro Mi fame,  singing and praying. I listened to the music, especially the one, in which the singers were implying that the building had reached its peak in spite of the expectations of some people. That is raw faith at work. The Holy Writ says with faith, you will tell a mountain to move and be cast into the sea and if you waiver not, so shall it be. “Let your Amen sound like thunder”!  That is what faith like “a mustard seed” does. When you are a developer and you have had the privilege of a General Superintendent laying his hands on you, you could mix ashes and sand together and build a skyscraper. Anointing, they say, breaks the yoke. I concur. I equally know that anointing, when wrongly and foolishly applied, kills its victims, and makes the righteous to suffer alongside, in their scores. God is not mocked to the extent that He would allow a 21-storey building, erected on  quicksand, to stand because a praise band like the Biblical Jehoshaphat’s was raised. What the Ikoyi building needed was strong concrete and not a prayer band. When in Genesis Chapter 6, God Almighty commissioned Noah to build an ark of gopher wood, God gave not just specifications of all materials to be used, He also instructed on the dimensions and measurements to be followed. God could have just said the word like He did in Genesis Chapter One and the Ark would have appeared, but He did not. He simply prepared a man to carry out the project and demanded  strict compliance with divine regulations. This is my own kind of faith!

All a building, the concrete strength of which had been under contention, even at the fourth floor needed, in the estimation of the developer, was a session  of “praise and worship and demon-slaying prayer”. This can only happen in Nigeria. And this is why the November 1, 2021 Ikoyi disaster should not be regarded as a force majeure. The Almighty will ask the blood of the over 40 others who died with Osibona in that building from all concerned and involved.

That is not just enough. If I were in government, I would personally railroad the entire management of the Lagos State Building Control Agency, LASBCA, not just its GM, Gbolahan Oki alone, but also the supervising commissioner and any other person that has anything to do with building construction monitoring, to Kirikiri Maximum Prison without trial. This disaster is beyond negligence. What we have here is a case of mass murder. No amount of compensation can assuage the pains and agonies of the bereaved. This is a case of an avoidable calamity. Some people should pay for it.

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