For the nation’s 50th year anniversary celebrations the president’s wife, Patience Jonathan, decided to share bags of rice to “alleviate the poverty” of local women – and did this in the crudest, most elementary way possible – by calling people together and throwing them bags of rice like beggars.
By the time she was through, there were plenty of casualties, some fatal, as citizens struggled not just for rice but also against the complete absence of crowd control measures or indeed any kind of preparation to handle the melee that was sure to ensue from that method of distribution.
The bottom line: someone wanted to make a public show of doing good, but the action was neither thought through nor planned well; a metaphor for many of this administration’s handling of crucial issues.
Last week however, it all became a bit too much..
At a campaign rally for the People’s Democratic Party at Port Harcourt sports stadium, where the president was heralded and governors received their party flags, it all ended in avoidable tragedy. Sixteen people died and many others were wounded from the stampede that ensued after a police officer fired into the air to disperse the crowd..
Unfortunately, this is no simple tragedy. According to reports, the problem began when crowds wanted to leave as the president was about to begin his speech. While there is no doubt that this probably had more to do with people’s impatience with speeches rather than any animosity towards the candidacy of Mr. Jonathan, his presidential security seems to have convinced itself that this would be embarrassing to the president. The guards therefore refused to allow the guests leave – especially because it appears the same thing had happened at a similar rally in Kaduna just the day before.
But a crowd that wants to leave is a crowd that wants to leave – and when the armed guards were unable to control the pushing any longer, one of them began to shoot. Evidently, in a democracy, a people cannot even choose whom to listen to and when, and it has somehow become a duty to sit still during a campaign rally. The result was chaos, death, and many wounded at an event where people came to answer the invitation of a man who wants their votes.
The information commissioner for Rivers State, Ibim Semenitari, confirmed the sequence of events. “As soon as governors finished receiving their flags, and the president was about to make his speech,” she revealed, “some of the people, who had come to celebrate with the president and their governors began to leave. Initially, the gates were opened, that is at the Liberation stadium. But people were leaving in an uncoordinated manner, and security personnel were trying to manage the crowd and in the process of managing the crowd, they shut the bigger gate. Then a woman fell down and the crowd started stepping on her, some other people fell subsequently, and more people were stepping on them; that was how the confusion started.
“Now, when that happened, the mobile police men, who were standing outside, shot into the air to scare others. They (MOPOL) released a shot into the air to stop further surge and rescue those on the ground. Unfortunately, that worsened the confusion and more people started pushing, rushing back, rushing forward, leading to more casualties.”
We are left to wonder, are the president and his staff - aware that he is in fact responsible for the security of the people he leads first and foremost?
Everything about this unfortunate series of events shows Nigerians that there is plenty to be worried about: the fact that the security measures were not only insufficient, but the course of action taken by those charged with ensuring crowd control precipitated the tragedy: the fact that the presidential guards took over the security functions that are usually the preserve of the local police: the fact that the government has not taken any steps to heighten security and crowd control measures in this election season that guarantees there will be many more such gatherings of large crowds.
How is the president going to safeguard lives in Jos if he cannot even safeguard lives at his own campaign rally?
As if to add insult to injury, speaking to newsmen after the incident, an obviously clueless Governor Godswill Obot Akpabio, of Akwa Ibom State, urged Nigerians to vote overwhelmingly for Mr. Jonathan as a mark of honour in memory of those who died in the incident. It would be comic if it weren’t so tragic.
After unnecessary denials and a concerted effort to minimise the true import of this story – the president’s team decided to put off his campaigns for a while in a mark of respect for the dead.
However, it is barely one week after, and the president is back on the campaign trail – this time to Jos, the same city he never visited while hundreds, even thousands, were being killed on his watch.
Indeed, there is much to mourn.
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