By EPHRAIM OSEJI & ANOZIE EGOLE

The easy-going life of 47 year old Chibuike Ikegwuonu, the owner of GSM clinic, could be said to have gone hay wire since 9th June 2013 when a fire outbreak at his shop in block B, shop one, Speedway plaza, Trinity, Ajegunle, claimed his goods worth over N14m.

The worst part of the story is that the young man, in his quest to boost the standard of his phone accessory outfit, recently obtained a soft loan from StanbicIBTC Bank and another Micro finance bank to the tune of N14.5m which all went down the rain.

The Anambra State born father of six was left with no option but to ask himself how he would sustain his family, having lost all he laboured for in less than two hours.  Probably, when Pastor Chibuike Ikegwuonu left for church in the morning of that fateful day, little did he know something terrible awaited him by noon. After receiving a call from his secretary,Chizoba Okeke on getting home from church that day,  what struck his mind was that there would be many customers the next day. But alas, that was not to be.

Chibuike Ikegwuonu (arrowed) during the fire outbreak at Trinity

“My secretary called me immediately I got home from church that day because she was not in town. I thought somebody needed some goods from the shop. But to my greatest surprise, she told me that one of our customers called to tell her our shop was on fire. I got my car key, went downstairs, but my car was blocked by people that were celebrating a birthday.

In order not to waste time, I left without the car and entered the next available motorcycle (Okada) to the place. When I got there, I saw that many other people were also rushing in the same direction. Then, I started having the feeling that something was definitely wrong somewhere.

When I got there, I found out that the fire had started one hour before I reached the scene. As a result, the first three blocks up stairs which mine was among had been razed. We were helpless,” recalls Ikegwuonu. He adds that most of the people he was sharing the plaza with were tyre importers and spare parts dealers and their commodities escalated the  fire outbreak.

“As a phone dealer who sells and repairs phones, all the properties inside my shop easily got burnt.  In that my shop, I had three offices. One was a warehouse where we store our goods, and we had one or two repairs, the other one was for our marketing where I sample my goods for sale. Everything was razed,” he laments.

In his estimation, the reason no property could be saved was that the fire service men arrived late at the scene. “The first set of fire service men that came were from Capital Oil before Julius Berger sent its team some minutes after, which was late,” he says.

The incident, he explains, has thrown his family into a state of confusion as he does not know how to start all over again – especially how to pay back the money he borrowed from the  bank for his business.

On what caused the fire, one Ogbonna who did not witness  how it started blames the Power Holding Company of Nigeria (PHCN). He says he was told the fire started immediately power was restored when they overheard a sharp sound from a nearby shop which was followed by billows of smoke.

The smoke, which did not seem so serious at first, became a conflagration which finally razed the line of shops.  “I was not there when the fire started because I went to church. When I finally got to the scene, though, calls started coming to my phone.

Some of them were calling to say ‘sorry’, thinking I had heard about the fire outbreak not knowing that I had not. The Capital Oil firemen were the first to arrive the scene before the Julius Berger firemen came. My shop was the first to catch fire,” Ogbonna recalls.

The young man, who laments experiencing untold hardship since the incident, calls on the National Emergency Maintenance Authority, (NEMA) to come to his rescue because he did not bargain for the incident. “I call on the Lagos State governor Babatunde Fashola, (SAN) who has been nice to us, to also come to our rescue as I  wouldn’t like to lose my family to hunger,” he quips.