The happenings around Nigeria have usually not been great, in the very recent times I mean. However, it had never been as bad as it is these past few weeks when it’s been all tales of tears and sorrow. It is as if we, as a people, are eagerly engaged in a fierce and very severe competition to throw up, dismember and tear down everything that had held us together for the past century from 1914. Added to this is the fact that the God of luck seems to have departed from our shores and left us to face the sad consequences of our collective actions and inactions over time.

As an adult who grew up in this country, I hardly can remember more than a few times, in my sojourn on this side of eternity, that we have had causes as a people to rejoice and say YES, this is the Nigeria of our dreams. Wole Soyinka winning a Nobel prize was one of those periods and those brief moments when Nigeria’s name creep up in the center stage of world activities such as during the Atlanta Olympics with the Golden Eaglet winning Gold and Chioma Ajunwa creating a record in long jump. Oh, how proud I was that Nigeria has arrived. Subtly also when the US gave Nigeria a category 1 rating that makes direct connections between Nigeria and US possible by flight, that was also great.

I wonder if we were to ask a Nigerian kid of his great Nigerian moments if he would have anything to share except recount the tales of woes and horrors about the kidnappings in the Niger Delta, the constant killings in Kano and the new addition to Nigeria’s lexicon – Boko Haram. Nothing pleasant here and I feel for the Nigerian child whose future we have jeopardized with our insensitive ness and lack of care towards each other as a people.

The trajectory of things is heart dampening – not a single cause to shout Hurray in the last one year. Not that we expect so much from a government that derived its ascendancy to the throne from the inner scheming of the selfish and morally corrupt elite circle of power brokers. No, we did not. But was it too much to expect to be able to live our lives in peace? To live fulfilled lives and grow old? To have grey hairs on our heads and see our children’s children? I don’t think this is too much to ask from even the most insane government of them all. We have long given up on having the simplest of expectations – access to good pipe borne water, constant electricity, standard medicare and great social infrastructure. It took us a very long time to realize that, for us, these are just dreams and our leaders will not  and cannot deliver on these! They are too engrained in corruption to see beyond their immediate selfishness.

What do we have, for our expectations? Callous and unnecessary deaths all around. A quick search on google for the word “Nigeria” will bring about tales of woe and I often wonder whether substituting this name with Iraq (during the decade of fights there) or with Syria will make any difference. I don’t think it will. People are dying and in great numbers. Is it the craziness of the onslaught of the Boko Haram set that should not cause alarms in the upper echelon of government or the increasing wave of piracy in the gulf of Guinea all around the Nigerian coasts? Why are we be saddled with leaders that are simply at a loss on what to do? It’s simple to conclude that after decades of abuse, the Nigerian project is finally grinding to a halt but this will be a fair accompli if we choose to think this way.

The news this week was on the preventable loss of 147 innocent lives – many in the prime of their youth when they were most useful in the project of nation building and development. The flying bird just simply got tired of flying and came down. Some will say it did so warily, some 10 nautical miles short of its destination.

And were we not expecting that this would happen? I doubt if anybody, including Harold Demuren himself will answer a No. The fact is we all knew something was bound to go wrong, someday. We just felt that the God of luck was still with us and we could keep on pretending that all was well when in fact nothing is well with our decrepit aviation system. Like the Ostrich, we were comfortable with burying our heads in the sands and hoping against hope that this disaster would pass us by.

The sad story is that all the early warning signals were there and they were visible for all of us to see. Let’s review them – is it the frequent cancellation of flights that our regulators were not aware of? The cancellations were often announced with glee that they were being done due to operational reason – now we know what the operational reasons are. The way our local flight operators were running these planes, we should have had many of these sad stories. We’re we also blind to the sad and sordid states of our terminals? One will ask what have these got to do with it and I will respond that this is a great indicator of how effective the Civil Aviation authorities are in regulating and maintaining sanity of our facilities. If we cannot maintain and regulate immovable properties such as Airports how confident am I that we are doing a great job of regulating movable Aircrafts? For months now, the employees of Nigeria Air have been shouting as to what they perceive are poor management attitude towards maintenance of the aircrafts and paying just wages to make the employees to discharge professional services, is anyone listening? No, not until something happens like the bed that just grew tired.

The actions of the aircraft operators, in response to the high cost and often inadequate availability of aviation fuel is not unknown to our authorities. Many at times, the air conditioning of the aircrafts would not be switched on until take off so as to conserve fuel, little wonder many believed the hypothesis that our flying bird ran out of fuel and could not make it to land at the Airport. This may not be the truth but whatever truth is eventually found out, it will be one of human failure which had happened times and times over and our authorities chose to look the other side without taking actions. Engines don’t just fail! They give warning signals. There are design limits, maintenance schedules which if operated within, these equipments will continue to deliver superior performance.

We lost fellow Nigerians in Majidun, we had lost innocent souls and fine officers in the Hercules crash, the Bellview crash and now it’s Dana, do we ever learn?

Those ruling us in Abuja who feel that they are immune from this should think twice. In the disaster list was Admiral Aikhomu’s son. I mention this not because the young man was deserving of death but to emphasize that we should all be concerned. If they feel protected in flying in the presidential fleet, are their wives, children, aunts, uncles, nephews, cousins protected as well? And will this be forever?

What we do this time around will cause us to make this the last of these perennial disasters in our aviation history or make it a child’s play compared with the next big one that will happen. Is anyone listening and taking action? The bells are already tolling again, for whom we don’t know but it might be anyone of us.