Since Saturday, January 8, 2011, residents of the house at 8, Adeniran Street, Abule Oki, Iyana-Ipaja, Lagos, have been wearing a gloomy look.
On that fateful day, a three-year-old boy fell into a well located in front of the house. He was brought out of the well dead.
The boy, ThankGod Ochikiri, was the only male child of his father’s seven children.
His father, Moses Odugbo, was devastated by the death of his heir, just as he told PUNCH METRO that since that Saturday, his world fell apart.
When our correspondent visited the house on Tuesday, Odugbo first took him to the well before talking to him.
The well is about 62 feet deep and has a weak and rusty iron sheet used as its cover. It is obvious that the rusty cover could not support any weight.
Odugbo (50) said that he asked ThankGod’s elder sister, Glory (9) to bath the boy on the fateful day. He added that in a matter of minutes, he heard the sister saying that she could not find him.
“As the sister rushed out to get him, she saw him standing on the peripheral of the well. When she tried to cajole him to come down, ThankGod tried to jump over to the other side, but the iron sheet was too weak to support him, and he fell into the well,” he said.
According to Odugbo, all efforts to bring the boy out alive were unsuccessful, adding that it took them almost three hours to get the boy out of the well.
“The fire fighters that came let down their first man only to be dragged out from the middle of the well. The same thing happened with the second man. Only a Good Samaritan that we did not know later went into the well and brought out the boy.
“The first man who made an attempt to bring out the boy from the well, was almost drowning. It took us almost an hour to bring him out,” Odugbo said.
Odugbo said that since they came into the house about six months ago, he had called the attention of their landlord’s son, who manages the place, over the use of use of appropriate materials to cover the well. But he claimed all his efforts fell to deaf ears.
Married 22 years ago to Alice, Odugbo’s family had been blessed with eight children - six girls and two boys. The first child of the family, a male, died at birth.
An environmentalist with Environmental Rights Action, Mr. Akinbode Oluwafemi, said the problem of wells in the country was a manifestation of a bigger problem in the country - a fact that the right of Nigerians to water is not guaranteed by the government at all levels.
He stated that Nigerians had taken the issue of digging wells to be a norm, adding that it was actually abnormal for people to rely on water from the wells in their houses.
He said, “Water is actually a collective resource owned by all of us. Government should provide water for every Nigerian for domestic consumption. That is where the problem is coming from.”
Oluwafemi told our correspondent that it was regrettable that these same wells produced human wastes for people to drink, and that Nigerians had wells that used all sorts of chemicals, some of which came from underground water.
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