The National Emergency Management Agency (NEMA) has confirmed the number of casualties involved in the twin bomb blast which occurred at midnight, yesterday, at Kuje and Nyanya, both satellite towns of the Nigerian capital, Abuja.
Coordinator of the agency’s Abuja Operation, Mr. Ishaya Chonoko, put the death toll at 15. He said that two persons have been reported dead at Nyanya while 21 were injured. At Kuje, 13 persons lost their lives while 20 were critically injured, Mr. Chonoko said.
He disclosed that the bodies of the victims have been evacuated to the Asokoro General Hospital and National Hospital, Abuja.
Meanwhile, NEMA Director General, Mohammed Sani-Sidi, who led some of the evacuations and visited victims in the hospitals, has assured that the government would foot the medical bill of the victims. He also reiterated the need for security consciousness among the citizens by reporting any suspicious objects and strange movement in their localities to security agencies.
May the souls of the deceased victims rest in the Lord/Allah, and a speedy and full recovery to the injured.
There is a need for national awareness-raising to empower the citizenry to be more vigilant and granted access to reporting any suspected circumstances/individuals – which should have been set up years ago.
Nevertheless, awareness campaign does not just confine to formal national proclamation after the event, it should be a consistent mechanism applied within all forms of social media, before, during and after TV/Radio programmes, network provider advertorials and locality information services such as ministries, banks and other public environments.
There is a need for greater farsightedness for public awareness to work in Nigeria as the current attitude is ‘mind-your-own-business’ due to lack of strong and reliable national and local leaderships. A Yoruba adage says’Ebi npa mi Olose n’kiri, igba ti mio w’enu bawo ni’nse ma we ode’?; translates as ‘I am hungry while the soap seller is hawking, how do I wash the body when I have not washed the inside’?
A form of incentive must come with any mechanism in use to motivate and enable people’s confidence to ‘whistle-blow’ without the fear of police harassment or reprisals from any ‘fingered’ suspect.As in other nation state attitudinal change, the mechanism should work in both ‘top-down and bottom-up’ stages so that the people can take such assignation as a mandate.