Bt Obi Nwakanma

Celestine Onwuliri – “Papauwa” – his oldest and closest friends called him, was a brilliant scientist and a committed public servant. He had served as a Commissioner in the Imo state government under the military, and later as Vice-Chancellor of the Federal University of Technology in Owerri.

He had been my uncle’s contemporary as students in the Sciences at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka in the early 1970s – he in the Biological Sciences and my uncle in the Physical Sciences.

I got to know him at a different level as a student at the University of Jos, where Dr. Onwuliri – as we always knew him – was already a rising star as a research scientist and professor in the Life and Biological sciences, alongside a coterie that included the likes of Agina, Ekwenchi, Akueshi, and so on at Jos in those years. He was avuncular, personable and collegial.

His wife Viola – now the honorable minister of state for Foreign Affairs in the current government – was actually a junior lecturer in Biology then and in Graduate school, but also taught the required General Studies Science to freshmen at Jos.

It was a young and adorable family, and we had a number of reasons to visit the Onwuliri home socially and notinfrequently at the Faculty and Staff Housing on Bauchi Road; sometimes with my friend Aloy Ojilere, now a Lecturer in Law at Imo state University, when we accompanied his cousin, E.C. Nkemdirim, who later became a Professor of Biochemistry at the Nigerian Defence Academy in Kaduna, but who was working then for his doctoral under the guidance of Onwuliri; or sometimes to visit Eddy Onwuliri, a thorough gentleman, upon whom we imposed from time to time.

Indeed, an amusing incident involving Viola Onwuliri and our late friend, Dike Achuko, rather early in our freshmen orientation week at Jos, did emphasize for us the admirable confidence, trust, and ease –that the Onwuliris modeled for us. In all those years, Dr. Celestine Onwuliri remained a kind and thoughtful mentor, especially to many of us from his neck of the wood coming to Jos.It is exactly a week today, when tragedy struck again at the heart of Nigerian aviation, further traumatizing an already fragile national psyche.

The Dana flight from Abuja plunged from the skies of Lagos, down unto a residential building in the Iju neighborhood in the surrounds of Lagos. Among the dead from that crash was Professor Onwuliri, who had not too long ago served out his time as Vice-Chancellor at FUTO, and had been appointed to the Nigerian Universities Commission, for whose business he was on that flight. It was a difficult call I made to Eddy Onwuliri last week at Abuja to speak about C.O.E Onwuliri in the past.

It is a call I’ve found too difficult to make to my friend, the honorable Ike C. Ibe, one time Speaker of the Imo state house of Assembly in the Third Republic for the terrible loss of his wife and daughter. Long before she became Echendu Ibe, she was Echendu Okwulehie – the loveliest girl in town in Umuahia of my adolescence. She was my muse. Her breathless beauty had provoked me to poetry.

As the news of the crash began to stream into the wires, my heart lurched from her misspelt name: the Dana manifest registered her as ‘Echeidu Ibe” – but there was a Maria Okwulehie and a Jennifer Ibe, right between that name, and it was in that moment I knew by some strange instinct that this may be Echendu among the dead.

Very recently, Ike had been blogging from Abuja, about the complexities of relocating to Nigeria and re-inserting his family into its social orbit in Abuja. In one of those blogs, he did mention the challenges his daughter Jennifer faced; the irreconcilable values that was thrust upon her from growing up in the United States and now attempting to fit into the profoundly disconcerting realities of Nigeria.

But Jennifer was making a good go at it. I’d made a promise to myself to pay a surprise visit to Ike and Echendu one of these days, whenever I was in Abuja. I’d seen Echendu last in 1998, when I was visiting in Maryland, where they’d been living after Ike Ibe moved to exile in the US following June 12.

Echendu and Ike had come to see me at a friend’s place in Silver Spring, and it was brief, and a lot of time had passed between us. I’d teased her on adding some weight, and I’d made a promise that I’d visit them at their home whenever I was in the DC metro area. I never had the chance to keep that promise.

Ironically, that lovely bundle of a child they came with that day in 1998, sleeping peacefully on Ike’s shoulder, was Jennifer. She had her mother’s looks even as a child. It is all now in the past, as it is for many others, including Livi Ajuonuma, who lit many a Sunday noon on Television with pure gaiety long before he went to the NNPC as its chief spokesman. I never knew the Anyaenes, but this young family was wiped out of the face of the earth in one fell swoop.

The dimension of the current tragedy is vast and spectacular, and yes, as the attorney Sonnie Ekwowusi said on a Channels TV program, a single aircrash takes unquantifiable emotional and economic toll on Nigeria. This is particularly true of this DANA airline crash. It is happening at a moment of deep national uncertainty and disillusion. The more notable part of Ekwowusi’s statement that raised my hackles indeed, is the testimony that he had written to complain about the condition of the Dana plane the week before.

He had traveled in it from Abuja. It felt rickety and unworthy to be in the air. So, the question: was the Dana plane air worthy? Who certified it? According to preliminary reports, the pilot, already cleared for landing had put out a “may day” miles from the airport. But planes do not just fall from the sky in such manner. Soon talks began to float that protocols that closed the airspace for the first lady had something to do with the tragedy.

The government quickly put out a statement denying this. No doubt this crash puts a fresh highlight on issues of both aviation safety and public safety. For one, the aviation minister who choked with tears publicly last Sunday has promised a thorough investigation.

Secondly, Mrs. Onwuliri, her ministerial colleague, in one stoical moment has said of her late husband, “the aspect of his death that pains us most is that someone like him, who did his work with utmost dedication, had to die due to the carelessness and greed of others.’’We must quit all the talk and get some action for a change. Images from the rescue operation point to a severe lack of technical ability on the part of the emergency services in Nigeria.

The violation of the incident scene by a crowd, and even the picture of a long line of people hoisting the water hose that piped water to the flames is reflective of a terrible level of inefficiency and disorganization. There is a need to build up, retrain, and re-orient emergency services protocol and personnel. There is real evidence that many victims could have been rescued alive, had emergency services been more equipped, efficient, and rapid. These deaths, and the facts, choke me to tears.