Theirs can be aptly described as a poor family; the house in which they live in Samonda area of the state capital attests to this. The 42-year-old Olatunbosun has been struggling to provide for his household with the meagre proceeds he realises from helping traders carry their loads from the motor park to their stalls in Bodija Market. Those who engage in such business are known as alabaru (load carrier). His 30-year-old wife is a petty trader.
Despite their low economic status, Olatunbosun’s dream is to raise enough money to educate the couple’s three children so that they, in turn, will one day, take care of him and his wife in their old age. This goal he has been pursuing tenaciously until fate dealt him a terrible blow two weeks ago.
He enrolled two of the boys: nine-year-old Oluwatimilehin, and his seven-year-old brother, Opeyemi, at Emmanuel Primary School 1, not too far from their residence in Samonda. Despite his meagre income, Kalejaiye makes it a duty to meet his children‘s educational demands on time. He had just bought some textbooks for the children.
What changed the course of his life occurred in the early hours of Oct. 12, 2010 when the two boys were on their way to school at about 7.15 am. Some motorists, suspected to be smugglers of fairly-used cars, popularly called Tokunbo, as it has become their style, were driving some vehicles on top speed. Some riot policemen, who were said to be on duty on the Sango-UI-Ojoo Road, were said to have attempted to stop the convoy of the suspected smugglers. When it became obvious that the miscreants were not ready to stop, the security officers reportedly started shooting.
In their bid to beat the policemen, the fleeing smugglers started driving dangerously. Three of them were said to have driven against traffic. As fate would have it, that scenario was playing out at a time Oluwatimilehin and Opeyemi were attempting to cross the highway on their way to their school.
The boys, unaware that the suspects were driving against the traffic, made to cross the highway, having looked at their side of the road and thought it was safe to do so. By the time one of the drivers of the vehicles would sight the boys, it was already late. He hit them, left them in the pool of their blood and fled.
The incident quickly attracted residents of the area and passers-by, who rushed to the scene with the aim of rescuing the siblings and rushing them to a nearby hospital for medical attention. But on getting to the spot, Oluwatimilehin was found to have died. His brother, Opeyemi, who was a bit luckier, was found with a broken limb and was quickly rushed to the hospital.
Their father, who was still at home at the time the accident occurred, was taking his bath when he heard a disturbing noise around the house. Initially, he did not pay attention to the noise because he felt some people were fighting outside. It was when he heard the names of his children from some wailing women that he ran out of the bathroom half-naked.
Fighting back tears, the distressed father told our correspondent that he initially did not know what was going on in his mind. “I ran out of the bathroom naked when I heard wailing women shouting my name, and the names of my boys. I could have been taken for a mad man. It did not take me too much time to get to the scene. When I got there, I found my two sons, the hopes of my tomorrow, who I had a few minutes earlier bade farewell in the pool of their own blood,” he said.
While he was holding tenaciously to the lifeless body of Oluwatimilehin and some sympathisers were rushing Opeyemi to the hospital, some irate youths took to the street to protest the incident. They made bonfire on the highway, causing traffic gridlock on the busy road.
It took the immediate deployment of a combined team of armed policemen and men of the Nigeria Security and Civil Defence Corps, who were backed by an Armoured Personnel Carrier, to restore normalcy to the troubled spot. Tear gas canisters were fired by the security agents to disperse the irate youths before normalcy could be restored.
The Divisional Police Officer in charge of the Sango Divisional Headquarters, Mrs. Sybil Akinfenwa, a Chief Superintendent of Police, later led some policemen to the scene and took the parents of the children to the police station as a way of dousing tension in the area.
The police station was besieged by sympathisers, who were there to mourn with the bereaved family. It took Akinfenwa and some family members a lot of time to calm down the grieving couple.
The Public Relations Officer of the state police command, Ms. Olabisi Okuwobi, a Deputy Superintendent of Police, confirmed the incident, promising that the case would be thoroughly investigated.
At press time, Opeyemi is said to be undergoing treatment at an undisclosed orthopaedic hospital. The bereaved parents were still in a mourning mood when our correspondent visited them on Wednesday.
The boys’ school headmaster, Mr. Akinyemi Ayodele, described the incident as disheartening. He recalled that the boys’ colleagues and teachers received the news of the incident with shock and disbelief.
Ayodele said that when the news broke, one of the major steps taken by the school authority was to report the incident to the State Schools Management Board.
One of those who betrayed emotion at the school was the late Oluwatimilehin’s class teacher, Mrs. Musirat Adeola. “As a mother myself, I couldn’t just imagine that the news was true. This is a boy that I see everyday as my pupil. I was devastated when I heard the news,” she said.
Efforts by our correspondent to get the photographs of the boys either at home or in their school did not yield any positive result. At home, their parents were still too devastated to search for their photographs.
They refused to state the hospital where Opeyemi was still on admission, insisting that they did not want to ”unnecessarily expose him to the world.”
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