Lagos | Tuesday
THOUSANDS of children are still missing 36 hours after fleeing the explosion of a weapons store in Nigeria’s main city, Lagos, a representative for the Nigerian Red Cross said on Tuesday.
“Many thousands of people, most of them children, have been displaced. There are thousands still missing,” said the representative Patrick Bawa.
The Red Cross has set up two camps to register displaced people and is providing food, water, clothing and comfort after hundreds of thousands of residents from the populated Ikeja area fled the firestorm.
Bawa said efforts began Wednesday to re-unite the missing with their families but so far it was slow work.
“So far we have registered 800 displaced people. Our mission is to link up missing families. Three hundred unaccompanied children have so far been registered,” he said.
“It is difficult to find one family intact,” Bawa said.
“You can see the pain and anguish on the faces of the parents who have lost their children,” he added.
Nigerian newspapers on Tuesday recounted the scenes of horror in Lagos.
“600 killed in canal”, was how The Punch titled the report with a rider: “20_000 displaced”.
The National Interest newspaper put the toll far higher, at more than 2_000, but its report could not be independently confirmed.
As the death toll climbed, people’s anger turned on the military responsible for the devastating blasts which destroyed buildings around the centre of the city late on Sunday.
“It is the military that has done this and someone, not the military, should start an immediate inquiry,” said a caller to a Lagos radio station late on Monday.
More than 600 people, mostly children, were pulled dead earlier from a canal complex in Lagos, hours after fleeing the explosions which took place for over three hours late on Sunday.
Whatever the final toll, the horror of the experience scarred faces across Lagos.
Ordnance rained down all over the city late on Sunday as fireballs flared into the night sky, rockets and a nearby petrol dump also exploding, after the armoury at the central Ikeja barracks caught fire.
Panic set in and hundreds of thousands of people fled.
In Isolo, the flight itself was the cause of the tragedy.
The district lies between the army barracks in Ikeja and the airport but is bisected by the massive canal.
Despite living in a lagoon-side city, many Lagosians cannot swim there are no public swimming pools or swimming lessons — and that was a major factor in the tragedy.
President Olusegun Obasanjo, himself a former soldier and military ruler, visited the site of the explosion early on Monday and promised speedy assistance and an inquiry, but a military investigation rather than the independent probe which people were clamouring for.
“What happened in Lagos was a monumental tragedy,” he said in a statement on national television and radio on Monday evening.
“Over 600 people mostly children and youths died in the disaster. It was a national disaster.”
Obasanjo said that the priority was to find the children who had fled, and the next was sorting out accommodation, food and necessary assistance and the could come a speedy military inquiry, he said.
“We must get people food relief, emergency relief, assistance in rebuilding accommodation and so on,” he said.
“The military must carry out an inquiry to find out exactly what happened, how it happened, who is to blame, if anyone is to blame, and what is to be done to prevent any reoccurrence,” the president stated.
Angered by the scenes of tragedy as bodies were pulled from the waters, Lagos State Governor Bola Tinubu blamed the accident at the poorly maintained armoury fully on the military.
“It is very tragic. It is a national disaster,” Tinubu said as he visited the site of the drowning. “It was not caused by any government but by the military,” he said.
Edwin Ojila, owner of a bar destroyed by a shell, agreed.
“The army. They ruin this country for so many years and now they scatter (destroy) our city. They are too much. No one can ever want them again,” he said.
Appearing on television late on Sunday to declare that the explosions did not signal the country’s seventh military coup, embarrassed Ikeja garrison commanding officer, Brigadier-General George Emdin, apologised to Lagosians.
“On behalf of the military I would like to apologise,” he said.
The explosion was the result of an accident in “an old ammunition depot with high-calibre bombs”.
This was unlikely to placate everyone. Members of the Army Wives Association said that the military had been warned before about the weapons dump after a smaller blast last year. – AFP