TUNJI AJIBADE
Lech Kaczynski died on Saturday in a plane crash. He was the president of Poland. He passed on with 96 other persons, the cream of Poland’s elite in the military, banking sector, private business and political class. The presidential plane crashed as it came in for a landing in thick fog in western Russia. And to think the president and his entourage were on their way to commemorate the death of their compatriots. Those ones, over 4000 Polish service personnel, had been arrested when the Soviets invaded Poland in September, 1939.
Soviet leader, Josef Stalin, later ordered his security forces to shoot them in April, 1940. Mass graves in Katyn Forest, Russia, had been their final destination ever since. As if to highlight the Russian mark, the plane was one of those designed by Russians in the early 1960’s. An old plane, that’s a fact. But age was not the immediate cause of the crash, the pilots of the plane were. They had overlooked little details.
The plan’s black box was recovered within hours of the crash. And the Air Force Deputy Chief said the pilots ignored information about bad weather. He said the pilots shouldn't have tried to land where they did; they should have diverted the plane to Minsk, another city in Russia. The plane circled the runway at least four times; it crashed on the last attempt, having missed the runway, not only by flying over it, but also by not lining up with the runway in the first place. It had buzzed the tops of trees when it crash landed. This is unfortunate. And as it often happens, it is people who directly experience a disaster like this that know its full impact. Polish people are in deep mourning at the moment.
But what has happened, once again, points to the fact that when attention is paid to little details, people or nation can save themselves avoidable pains. At the first announcement, this writer recalled that U.S. President Barrack Obama was in Prague, Czech Republic, Eastern Europe, to sign a treaty with his Russian counterpart in the course of the same week.
The need to for a neutral ground was possibly a consideration for the venue. But nothing stopped Obama from going to the Kremlin. Could the fact of the horrible weather have been in the calculation? Maybe. And that says something. The president’s men gave thought to every angle of a possible visit to Russia at that point in time. Just as White House thought of meeting Kremlin, and State Department thought of preparing the Secretary of State to be part of his entourage, the weather people also did their own job.
For a journey to Prague, not even to Moscow, White House consulted the Meteorological Department of the United States of America. That says a something about coordination. Nations that are coordinated, and make good use of available information, benefit from it.
There was a time a civilian leader in Nigeria hosted a party at Eagle Square, Abuja. That’s a distance of less than three kilometers from the Presidential Villa. Mr. President invited many from home and abroad. It was May, and Democracy Day was what he celebrated. Fond of Awilo Longomba, a musician born in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo, the President had the man and his entire band brought to Abuja. The Master of Ceremony was later to announce in the course of the event, and in the middle of a heavy rain, that the instruments were wet, the musician would not perform life anymore, so that musical instruments would not blow up. In the end, Awilo mimed one his songs played from a tape recorder. The question came to this writer’s mind on that occasion: How come the president’s men didn’t coordinate with the meteorological department, and make adequate preparation for the weather.
Little details made Nigerians tax payers lose the money their president spent importing Awilo. It could have been more serious – this thing about ignoring information, or paying no attention to little details. The number of lives lost in plane crashes in Nigeria because pilots refused to take weather information into consideration before they took off is mind bungling. Yet, near but unreported misses continue to occur all the time. The unfortunate incident that Polish people experience at the moment, is once a gain, a reminder of the need for aviation officials to do things the way they should be done.
Situations in which any man can pick a car and ram into the underbelly of a moving airplane at Nigerian airport, as it happened days back, calls for worry. And that is not to mention aged airplanes, as well as the unenviable state of the nation’s airports. For Nigerian officials who ought to put things right but refuse to, the unfortunate incident involving a national leader and the cream of Poland’s society should be a trumpet sounded in warning.
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