Lagos Building Collapse Kills Three (DPA)
Three people were killed Saturday in Lagos, Nigeria's business capital in the south-west, when the building in which they lived collapsed.
Two other people sustained serious injuries in the accident and were taken to a nearby hospital for treatment.
General Manager of the Lagos State Emergency Management Agency, Dr Femi Osayimeolu, was at the head of a rescue team still working to ensure that no victim was left under the debris of the collapsed building.
He said the cause of the accident had yet to be ascertained, but said it could possibly be due to the use of poor quality materials in the construction of the building.
Torrential rainfall in the past week may have contributed to the collapse, he added.
Osayimeolu lamented the many building collapses in the largely unplanned Lagos State capital and said the government was trying to ensure that builders used good quality materials in construction.
'The state government has already identified 92 buildings to be pulled down over the suspicion that they were made of low quality materials,' he said.
'It is unfortunate that people convert bungalows to two story- buildings without requisite approvals even when they know that the original building had been constructed decades ago,' he said.
The Niger Delta Waiting Game (Vanguard)
Indication that the government of President Umaru Yar'Adua desires to tackle the Niger-Delta crisis was the freedom granted the leader of the Niger-Delta Peoples Volunteer Front (NDPVF), Alhaji Mujahid Dokubo-Asari, by a Federal High Court in Abuja, Thursday, June 14, after spending almost two years in detention and, expectedly, the embrace is generating encouraging feedback from the militants and people of the region. Yar'Adua had, few days after he assumed office, invited the governors of the volatile states, Delta, Rivers and Bayelsa - Dr. Emmanuel Uduaghan, Sir Celestine Omehia and Chief Timpre Sylva-Sam, to Abuja over the escalating cases of hostage taking in the region, where the governors told him that the release of Dokubo-Asari was a sine qua non for the return of peace to the troubled region.
But there was enragement some days later, as the Supreme Court refused bail for the militant leader on the grounds of national security. In fact, it was thought that either Yar'Adua was adopting the headstrong stand of his predecessor, former President Olusegun Obasanjo, contrary to his May 29 inaugural proclamation of being "a listener and a doer" or he was just playing numb to the demands of the people of the Niger-Delta.
Back to the drawing board: Some militant leaders went back to the drawing board, having rejected some purported conditions allegedly given to the vice president, Goodluck Jonathan for the release of their grand commander but the hullabaloo was cleared by Justice Peter Olayiwola when he granted Dokubo-Asari bail, last Thursday.
Peace would take sometime to come: There is no doubt that the release of the militant boss would reduce tension in the region but in the words of the national leader of the Ijaw ethnic nationality and former federal commissioner for information, Chief Edwin Clark, "Freeing Dokubo-Asari cannot bring peace overnight. There will be peace but it will take sometime. However, development has to follow his release. The people of the Niger-Delta will not continue to live in abject poverty because Asari has been released. While the release of Dokubo-Asari has helped to calm frayed nerves in the region, there is no indication that it would stop hostage-taking. The militant chief, himself, confirmed in an interview with newsmen that he was not in the position to stop hostage taking in the region. He was being straightforward, as the kidnapping business has since 2005 when he was locked up, gone beyond what he alone could manage.
Ogboinbiri episode
Twenty-four hours before his release, precisely Wednesday, June 13, men of the Joint Task Force (JTF) in the Niger-Delta had confrontation with supposed militants at the Chanomi Creek in Warri and Ogboinbiri waterways in the Southern Ijaw Local Government Area of Bayelsa State.
The Bayelsa incident was bloody but the events are similar. In the case of Delta State, three Ijaw youths who were travelling in a speedboat, reportedly, ran into a convoy of the task force, which was escorting logistics of an oil company in the creek, and the soldiers opened fire on them following a misunderstanding. The youths, however, dived into the river before the bullets could reach them. There was no death.
Overtaking their convoy
A senior member of the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger-Delta (MEND) in Delta State told Sunday Vanguard that the soldiers whose boats were not as fast as that of the youths did not, apparently, want any other speedboat to overtake their convoy but the youths did not see why they should be prevented from overtaking them. "It was in the process", he said, that the soldiers opened fire on them, they were not armed.
The Bayelsa clash was slightly different. According to the military public relations officer (MPRO), O.A. Ochagwuba, in a press statement, reacting to media reports on the killing of nine militants, made available to Sunday Vanguard in Warri: "To set the records straight, a reliable source positively identified those killed as militants from the camp of one Commander Isaac. The source said they were coming from Gbaran where they went for fortification in preparation for an attack against the Agip Oil Flow Station. Among those killed was one of their juju men. Those killed were on a reconnaissance patrol to the Agip Flow Station which they were planning to attack. When the militants opened fire on the soldiers protecting the Agip Flow Station, they defended themselves by returning fire. At the end of the firefight, eight militants were killed; one was wounded and later died. After the clash and their boat was searched, 143 rounds of 7.52mm NATO and 40 rounds of 7.62 mm special were recovered. The soldiers did not sustain any casualty during the clash", he added.
A militant leader who spoke to Sunday Vanguard on the matter the day Dokubo-Asari was released said the boys were not armed but were stopped by the soldiers, who conducted a search on them, and on seeing that some things were tied around their waist, ostensibly for protection, they shot at them. He said a reprisal attack would not be ruled out and, true to his statement, militants mobilized from various parts of the Niger-Delta region, armed with dynamites and machine guns, last Sunday morning, confronted men of the Task Force at the Ogboinbiri Flow Station and reportedly killed some soldiers.
The attack, from information gathered by Sunday Vanguard, was to tell the soldiers that the fact that they had declared a ceasefire and Dokubo-Asari has been released should not by any stretch of imagination be conceived to mean that the soldiers should do whatever they like with anybody suspected to be a militant in the creek. Dokubo-Asari who was savoring the third day of his freedom was observably not in the know of the attack. Also, in the morning of Friday, June 15, a kidnap gang stormed Sapele in Delta State, ambushed a bus conveying two Indian workers of an Oghara-based rubber firm to work at Akintola Junction, and abducted them. The Delta Waterways Security Committee is already handling the matter but available information showed that the kidnapping was carried out by criminals who were desperate to make quick money. A delegation of the committee met with the militants in their den on Tuesday and they demanded ransom before the hostages would be released. Unfortunately for them, two of their colleagues were already in the net of the Task Force and they want their men released also in addition to the ransom.
Leopard cannot change its spot:
Regardless of the two incidents after the release of Dokubo-Asari, it is still believed that the militant chief has what it takes to talk to the militants to drop their arms because they defer to him as their generalissimo. Dokubo-Asari, since his release, has left no one in doubt that a leopard cannot change its spot and that he remained a reincarnate of the forbearer of the Ijaw struggle, the late Isaac Adaka-Boro with his tough talks on the inevitability of sovereign national conference and continuation of the resource control struggle.
Can Asari make the difference? At the moment, he has opened talks with his arch-rival in Rivers State, Ateke Tom, and is rallying the leaders of the militants groups in the region together for a possible grand summit on how to stop hostage taking and plot a way forward for the region. His love for Jonathan is pervasive as he recently declared that "Jonathan's emergence as vice president had put a K-leg" in the Niger-Delta struggle. He, however, condemned hostage taking in all its ramifications, saying, "It is not because anybody asked me to condemn it. You cannot claim to be doing justice when you are doing injustice to another person.
"The people who came to work in the Niger-Delta were brought by an unjust law. When you catch people and you confine them and you ask for money not for the struggle, it is sinful, if it is for the struggle, it a different matter."
With the return of Dokubo-Asari to the scene, a militant leader told Sunday Vanguard that most of those in the struggle for money making would unquestionably run for their dear lives because he would not take it likely with them. That will undeniably gladden the heart of many. Our source said that while in detention, Dokubo-Asari sent words out that if he comes out, he would deal squarely with one of them who was said to have undermined the struggle in many ways. Sunday Vanguard could not, however, confirm the authenticity of the information.
Next line of action
Already, various militant groups were understood to be pledging their loyalty to Dokubo-Asari and some have declared that they were waiting for him to tell them the next line of action. If they are waiting for the next line of action from Dokubo-Asari, well, they don't have to wait long, for the militant chief, in an interview, published, last Sunday, said he would cooperate with the present government, especially as an Ijaw man is the number two citizen. He stated that it was only when the government has been found not to be interested in developing the Niger-Delta that he would review his stand. For now, he pleaded with the militants to "return to the era where we have human dignity and respect and make conscious effort to preserve it."
Advice to Dokubo-Asari
Vice chairman of the Ogbe-Ijoh Governing Council, Mr. Joseph Hitler, advised Dokubo-Asari to make wide consultation with Ijaw leaders and the youths to know the way forward, saying that he should not lead any attack against the government because of his hard-earned freedom. A member of one of the militant groups told Sunday Vanguard: "Asari is very busy now; we want to give him time to settle down first. But when we meet with him, we will tell him not to talk too much because it is his statements in the past that landed him in trouble. Most of us fought for him to be out, a lot of our boys lost their lives in the battle to release him and I tell you that if he is picked up again, not many people would be willing to lay down their lives for him.
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