Prof Iyayi’s death and our culture of recklessness

Aliyu Musa

The death of Professor Festus Iyayi Tuesday in a car crash was another avoidable tragedy that further illustrates us as a set of reckless and lawless people. It also reminds of the painful fact that we value life too little and, sadly, in a hurry to put things behind us regardless of the agonies of victims and their survivors.

Like many Nigerians I remember Professor Iyayi from his days of Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) activism at the University of Benin, which climaxed in his detention in 1988. I later read accounts of his mistreatment during the period of his incarceration, something I came to identify with more when I found myself in a similar situation half a dozen years later.

But more importantly I remember the erudite academic from his literary contributions. Heroes, which won him the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize in 1988, appealed easily to my appetite for stories of the Nigeria-Biafra civil war. Although a thorough work of fiction, it was a comfy departure from the other versions I read.

Heroes, unlike Alexander Madiebo’s The Nigerian revolution and the Biafran War or Adewale Ademoyega’s Why we struck: the story of the first Nigerian coup that I read earlier, did not attempt to justify the secession or Nigeria’s bid to stop it. It plainly condemned the bloodshed and made a common case for victims on both sides, and Nigeria, as a country.

That today Professor Iyayi is a fatality of the same contradictions that snowballed into the war he wrote about and the ills he fought so courageously against leaves one wondering whether we will ever get it right. And the concern transcends his specific case.

We have spoken so much about our nonchalance to life that it is now a too familiar jingle. But with each case of recklessness we are forced to dust our file to scroll the list and remind ourselves of previous victims and perpetrators while simultaneously adding on new names.

The convoy of Governor Wada Idris Wada of Kogi State, which reports say rammed into the University of Benin bus conveying Professor Iyayi and his colleagues to an ASUU meeting in Kano, is not new to the business of joy-riding-goes-horribly-wrong. In December 2012 it was involved in a ghastly crash that cost the life of an aide of the governor and left Governor Wada with serious injuries. But it is, indeed, a shame that no lesson was learnt from that incident.

Clearly, someone has to accept some responsibility for this mess and, claims by credible source of no less standing than the Kogi Sector Command of the Federal Road Safety Commission that the accident was actually caused by a vehicle in the governor’s convoy suggest that someone is the governor. But with the way things are in the country I doubt whether he will or anyone will be able to make him do.

When in December 2001 a similar convoy on a reckless joy ride crashed into a car a newlywed couple drove and killed them the man whose convoy it was paid a price – a precious one at that. The country’s Co-operation and Integration in Africa Minister Dapo Sarunmi was blamed for not only the recklessness of his convoy but also for thoughtlessly abandoning the dying couple to head off to his original destination. Strangely too, two of his aides died in the crash, again showing how life means nothing to our leaders.

But the heat the entire event generated became too hot for the minister to handle. And by the time it died down he had lost his job and that marked his transition to political inconspicuousness.

Not that anything will happen to anyone in this case, not the least the governor who by now, through the action of his convoy has built a reputation for recklessness, ghastliness and intolerance for other road users. But it is hoped that someone would make a case for the grasses that are trampled on each day the big shots of the society show off their power by usurping spaces that are normally meant to be everyone’s.

In 2010, when I visited Nigeria last, I had the unenviable experience of waiting on board a Lagos-bound plane for two hours at the tarmac simply because some so-called more important Nigerians were using our destination tarmac and could not risk mingling with less important mortals like us. It’s such show of intolerance that caused the crash that killed Professor Iyayi and many others. This needs stop, somehow.

This piece was written on 13/11/2013.