Qaddara and the Kano bridge tragedy

Also published in Daily Trust 

The collapse of a giant concrete beam of a not yet completed pedestrian bridge on Sheikh Ja’afar road in Kano metropolis that crushed seven people to death last Sunday was extremely tragic. The widely circulated images of the squashed taxicab in which they were travelling say it all about the unimaginable pain and agony they had suffered before their deaths.

The fact that the bridge construction site was not cordoned off to prevent people from accessing the area while work was underway means that the construction company had flouted the standard safety measures usually taken at construction sites. It might have also compromised on the structural quality of the pedestrian bridge in order to maximize profit and/or cover the cost of kickbacks and other corrupt practices, which also means that the incident was probably, if not certainly, preventable.

Yet, barring any turn of events, nobody will be prosecuted and punished. Also, the limited media attention and public outcry it has generated and the sympathy expressed for the victims will soon evaporate. After all, even in its official statement released in the aftermath of the incident, Kano state government did not show any serious commitment to conduct any serious probe into the incident either, let alone prosecute and appropriately punish the culprits whose acts of sheer recklessness, and deliberate negligence caused the incident.

Moreover, contrary to government’s ‘commitment’ to ‘ensure that the victims and their families are adequately compensated by the company’, the victims’ families may not be sufficiently compensated, after all. Also, even the inadequate compensations they may end up with would probably be paid after unnecessarily long, exhaustive, and frustrating struggle.

In any case, the victims’ families may also face tremendous pressure from their respective relatives and the society as well to accept whatever small amounts of money they may eventually be given as compensations, or face pressure to concede their rights to compensation altogether for that matter. Furthermore, if the victims’ families or some of them insist on getting maximum compensations and ensuring that those responsible for the incident get maximum punishments, they would simply be socially stigmatized and in fact be accused of denial of qaddara i.e. divine predestination.

By the way, the widespread misconception and indiscriminate misapplication of the concept of qaddara in handling cases of inexcusable negligence, deliberate recklessness and serious crime simply and effectively enables many irresponsible people and unrepentant criminals to evade punishment, which consequently encourages impunity hence lawlessness in the society.

It is very ironic that while we often lament what we rightly or wrongly regard as display of inadequate concern and indifference by the so-called developed countries when human lives are unnecessarily lost in many developing countries particularly in Africa including Nigeria, we in the meantime overlook or simply refuse to admit our failure to appropriately value our own lives, public safety and security, in the first place.

To digress a little, in a related and equally heartbreaking recent incident, a young man I personally know in my native neighbourhood in Kofar Nassarawa, Kano Municipal was severely knocked down by a tipper truck while riding his motorbike in Kano metropolis as a result of which he sustained life-threatening injuries.

Though he was immediately evacuated to Murtala Mohammed Specialist Hospital for urgent medical attention, he was not medically attended to until after several hours, and when it appeared that he had actually suffered multiple fractures, three on one leg and one on the other leg, the doctors decided to refer him to the National Orthopaedic Hospital also in Kano where it was discovered that, due to the long and unwarranted delay before attending to him at Murtala Mohammed Hospital the three fractures on one of his leg had got too damaged to be fixed and that the affected leg as a whole had to be amputated in order to save his life, and it was therefore immediately amputated.

Now, while the victim is currently fighting for his life and, even if he manages to survive, faces the challenges of life as a severely disabled person with all its obvious implications in Nigerian context, the tipper truck driver must have benefitted from the excuse of the misunderstood and misapplied concept of qaddara as he was simply released from police custody four days after the incident.

 
Getting back to the main subject i.e. the bridge tragedy, it is obvious that, any incident of such magnitude in any civilized country in the world will definitely cost many government officials their jobs, and a comprehensive probe into every single relevant aspect of the causes of the incident will be conducted in order to prosecute and punish the culprits.

In 2009 for instance, Chinese authorities executed two persons directly responsible for the production and sale of contaminated infant milk that caused the deaths of at least six children. Also many others were given various heavy jail sentences for their various roles in the crime.

Anyway, Kano state governor, Eng Rabi’u Musa Kwankwaso, should launch a full-scale investigation into the process of the pedestrian bridge contract award and the process of its execution to ensure that due process was followed in the first place, and to also determine the extent of the company’s compliance with all relevant professional and technical standards.

This would certainly pave the way for identifying, prosecuting and punishing the culprits who should also be compelled to bear the financial burden of adequately compensating the victims’ families, in addition to their respective jail sentences of course.