‘Our lives no longer the same after Dana crash’

The once busy Popoola street, Iju- Ishaga in Agege local government area of Lagos State now looks like a ghost town with passersby consciously avoiding a look at the Dana crash site for fear of having flashbacks. Some who buried their emotions came to have a look at the cenotaph unveiled on Monday.
Walking into the street, you wouldn’t need a soothsayer to tell you something terrible happened there.

The gory story of Sunday 3rd June, 2012 which many Nigerians termed , “Black Sunday” resurfaced on Monday when the state, led by the governor, marked a year’s remembrance of the tragedy with a cenotaph unveiled by Governor Babatunde Fashola.
As if on cue, residents of the area decried the  exodus of their neighbors since the disaster, describing the place as a ghost town that is not conducive for living. While some have left, others are still busy with their normal daily activities, trying to make ends meet.
For Abiola Garuba, songs of praise can never cease as she escaped death by a whisker.
The young girl said that since the crash, the government and management of Dana have been making promises to them and none had been fulfilled. Abiola, who should be in her mid-20s, has this to say: “ The government is not doing anything to ensure that they fulfill their promises of compensating the victims who were affected. They have forgotten that it is not only people who are on air that were affected, there are also ground victims.
Part of our house was affected. My grandmother’s new shop which was located beside the crash site was destroyed and the government seems to be doing nothing about that. They have not even compensated the landlord on whose house the plane crashed. They should come and do something. As you can see, we are tired of speaking to journalists all the time with the government making little or no effort to help us,” she said.
According to Abiola, the road construction that seems to be going on in the area was as a result of the cenotaph unveiled by the state government on Monday marking the one year anniversary of the crash. “The government is just busy repairing the roads with the hope that dignitaries like the president would come. They are grading the roads and constructing gutters so that people who would come for the unveiling of the cenotaph don’t find it difficult going back. This is not how the road was when the incident happened.
In fact, they have destroyed most shops on this street just because they want to construct gutters. My grandmother’s new shop that is about a month old has been destroyed. The road that they claim they are constructing didn’t get to the extreme. They just constructed the places people can easily see and praise them.
We are begging the government to do something,” she quipped, adding that she is so grateful to God for sparing the life of her grandmother whose one-year transition they would have been marking if not that she left to get something from the market five minutes before the incident happened last year.
The old woman, who should be in her mid 70s according to Abiola, fainted when she heard of the crash that happened almost where she left some five minutes before, and she spent over 2 weeks in the hospital before recovering.
When the aged woman was contacted for her reaction, she said in Yoruba language that she had no strength to say anything.
If John Dapo had any premonition that people who swooped on his partly affected apartment that fateful day had plans to loot some valuables like TV sets, CDs, Home theater, among others,  he surely wouldn’t have allowed them. But on that day, he gave them the freedom to help.  John has been living from hand to mouth since June 3rd 2012 when he lost some parts of his apartment and properties to the crash.
Not only that, he now struggles to put food on the table with his menial vulcanizing job. “Maybe you journalists would help us tell the government to come to our rescue. It seems they have abandoned the ground victims. Things are no longer the same since the incident.
Our affected house was taken care of by the tenants with the help of the landlord. We cannot sleep outside so we have to source for asbestos to roof the house for us to sleep,” John decried.
According to him, many people have moved out of the area which they describe as a ghost town with more than 100 people buried in the same place at the same time.
“ This place is abnormally very quiet unlike before. If you had come to this place before the crash, you would enjoy staying here. It bubbled very much. The affected house was one of the most beautiful houses in this area and now, the concerned do not want to compensate the landlord. It is so bad,” he lamented.