On Sunday, January 27th 2002, panic, chaos and pandemonium gripped residents of Ikeja and environs due to scary sounds which seemed like that of war. A market very close to the Ikeja Army Cantonment had caught fire and the fire had carelessly spread into the high-grade compartment where munitions are stored in the cantonment.
The result of this catastrophe, widely known by many as the Ikeja bomb blast, was a huge explosion followed by a series of more, which immediately killed about 600 soldiers and residents in and around the cantonment itself, caused tremors which shattered windows of thousands of houses, created panic in the mind of Lagos residents living as far as a 15km radius to the cantonment and pushed many into panic-induced deaths.
Aside from the fact that the natural human instinct is to run away from the direction of danger, traumatic experiences of war such as the Nigerian Civil War or that of violence meted during some past military junta on innocent civilians must have magnified how the victims reacted to the sound of the multiple explosions. Some even thought the explosion was as a result of a violent military takeover of the new civilian government, and they were determined on having no share in that violence. Right from the moment, on that Sunday evening, when the armoury exploded, people fled for dear life. Even those who were not in the immediate vicinity of the crisis could hardly sleep. Some Lagosians who lived far away could see a huge bright haze in the night skies, in the direction of Ikeja. No one was sure of what was happening until the event had claimed several lives.
As people fled from the centre of the
It was a very sad development for survivors and government to realize that by
When President Olusegun Obasanjo arrived at the centr of fire the next day, people jeered at him in anger, and he in return made some defensive remarks which further infuriated the nation at large. Citizens felt Obasanjo’s response – “I do not have to be here”, were not empathetic enough to the tragedy which victims have experienced due to sheer negligence and carelessness of the Nigerian Army in tightly securing their weapons. Ikeja Cantonment is, of course, one of the few military facilities situated in a high-brow residential area; and at this point, if residents could convince Obasanjo to move the cantonment, they would because they were mourning their losses, and infuriated.
However, to pacify negative public sentiment mainly, the Federal government set up an inquiry into the unfortunate event but the report was never released to the public – perhaps due to the security implications it contained.
If at all the government and the military took away anything after the Ikeja explosion, it would be that high-grade explosive devices should never be stored in highly populated or residential areas. If citizens learnt anything after the blast it would be that, for survival, panicking and poor decision-making at times of crisis could further pose a death risk on lives.
And lastly, the fact that explosive devices or potent items should never be kept with the people and the
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