It was January 27, 2002. I was preparing for Jamb then. My family went to my hometown for a relative burial leaving only me at home. After reading for a while, I decided to switch on the TV. I cant remember which teams were playing, but I know I was carried away by the football match.
All of a sudden, I heard a big bang.
I initially thought it was my neighbour kids. I thought to myself that
if it's any of those kids disturbing my peace, I will beat the crap out
of them. Few seconds later, I heard another bang. But this time around
the ground was vibrating. I said to myself, wait a minute, these kids
can't have such power to bang and vibrate the ground.
So I decided to go outside and observe what was going on. To my utmost
surprise, I saw mammoth of crowd, everyone looking confused to what was
going on. Then I went to the top floor of the 3rd house to my house
which is a 3 storey building to have a better glimpse of what was going
on. There I saw crowd of adults all speculating what was happening.
Some said the military has overthrown Obasanjo, some said another civil war has broken out - Papa Chidi started talking about the ordeal of the civil war, and how he prayed never to witness another war in his lifetime, some said it was Cameroun fighting Nigeria because of Bakassi peninsula.
Bro Dee came up with the most reasonable speculation that from his
observation that he thinks it is an explosive factory that mistakenly
caught fire and set up the chain reaction. While everyone was
speculating what the situation is, Mama
Mary out of nowhere with anxiety and fear written all over her face
shouted let's start running to the 4th street away. Then I said how are
we sure those people there are not trying to run to our own street.
Bro Dee looked at me and said this young man is very intelligent. He
told Mama Mary to calm down that we will continue to listen to radio to
know what the problem is, then after we know what the problem is, we can
strategize what to do next.
After about 30 minutes later, we heard in the radio that it was a
mistake from military cantonment that caused explosives to start
exploding. Not too long afterwards, my pops eventually got through to my
neighbour who he had tried to call like a million times in order to
talk to me. He narrated what he heard from my hometown, and I told him
I'm aware of the situation and everything is fine with me. I could feel
panic in my mom's voice at the background (the fear of a mother).
It wasn't until the next day that we heard of the bad news of how a lot of lives were lost in the Oke Afa canal. That day, I saw Mama Mary, and I asked her if she heard of the Oke Afa tragic news, she said yes. Then
I told her that can she see why it's not good to start running when you
don't know what you're running from. She said my brother it is TRUE o.
Moral of the lesson: Don't run when you don't know what is pursuing you, and don't pray for war when you haven't witnessed one before.
- as shared by SlurryEye
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