Pastor Muyiwa Bamgbose , President Bodija Estate Resident Association, in this interview with National Insight Editor Remi Oladoye said numbers of people are still missing from the Bodija Explosion incident which occured in the 16th of January 2023 . He acknowledged and appreciate Government intervention on the development but still believes “our best is shor of word best” excerpt
Can we meet you sir?
My name is Muyiwa Bamgbose, a pastor, i am the president of BERA, it has a number of association
You talked earlier about missing people from the incident, from your record, how many people are still missing
I am not in a position to be specific but between the ones that have been confirmed dead, there is one body that has been unidentified i was told, it is now about 8 or 9 the neighborhood are talking about because we have brought the map of the street to them and trying to account for house by house. that how we can actually get accurate figure because if the person was seen yesterday and you cant find him today you need to get worried,.i believe its nearer 10 now
Government offers, accomodation and free medical cares but we are aware that some people are still footing their bills, is the association aware
A lot of people paid for their medicals those who could afford it,so many people didn’t even go to the designated hospital, they just went somewhere to treat themselves, and i must also confess that some of the hospitals i know about JRafa, Redeemers and others they were treating people initially without even recording, they gave people first aide treatment, the hospital contributed, they treated people without asking for money and some people that could afford just took themselves to their private hospitals and interm of the hotels there are families whose thier families paid into the hotels because there isn’t proper organization, for instance if you are a decent person and they told you government is paying for your accomodations,God forbid for me i won’t walk into such hotel and say that i was told that i can stay here free of charge, i will rather have a paper that says that i am assigned to this particular hotel, our fear is that Gov may end up being shortchanged, how do you know who stays where, yes it was a chaotic situation again there should be some kind of order and process so that is why some people don’t wait for anybody the just took care of themselves since they can afford it, a lot of people are taking care of themselves
Are you satisfied with the level of government intervention so far
Well,this is the first in Oyo state we never had anything like this before, i must first and foremost appreciate the spirit of the government, the government is definitely concerned, there is a different between a will and ability, then if you are willing then ability can come in later may be things
can come up or start, we know some government that are not even willing so i can say that the administration have shown a great deal of willingness, people have worked overnight without sleeping, even the federal government, you will be surprised they have taking this thing that happened in Ibadan so serious, all the security agencies deployed their officers to the sites, the BOMB expert were there, NEMA working with State Emergency agency, everybody has collaborated but our best seems to be short of world best and i think we need to learn from this experience to know where we have failed one of the things we are discussing in Bodija is where are the gaps, what are the things that we didn’t do right that we can improve on , God forbid we are not praying for another one to happen but, it may not be blast, it may be something else, emergencies can always occur it could be flood or anything, how do we respond to emergency so i think we need to improve on the practices
The question people are still asking is who is the owner of the house, were they trapped in the house during the incident or they are alive
Well, we are yet to find anybody who claims he was staying in that house from all records and that is another area of deficiency and we have taking it upon ourselves, we are talking about know your neighbour, we are not just talking about know your neighbor, know who is living there, who is the owner of the house, is there an agent involved in the house, if someone is staying in the house, what does he do. what is his business, we really need to know ourselves, we cant assume, if we had good record it would have been easy to punch figure out and give accurate data, that record doesn’t exist right now so it is difficult to say who is actually staying there, people talked about some people running out of that house just when the thing started, they were running away and nobody knows wether they were cut up in the blast or they just disappeared so nobody has a good record of who resides there and what happened to them or who they are, we don’t have the record but definitely in the housing corporation they will have the record but you wont be surprised if the name on their record has changed those house and the person who bought the house don’t change the ownership and this are things we are working on in Bodija
Can you tell us about Bodija Smart Initiative you are launching today?
our position is this, Bodija has changed, there are so many modern building , it is changing from the use residential building to commercial centres, lounges and things like that and and you cant police an advance environment with rudimentary approach, so the days of flower Gardens or just get the people that will be blowing the whistle is gone so we have to upgrade our security, waste management disposal and others. we have about seven pillars on it that we can use to transform Bodija, our intention is to transform Bodija you know Bodija is one of the first set of residential estate in Africa, so it should be a pace setter, people should come here to learn and go back to their country or cities or state to implement what they have learned and see here and that is what is going to happen with Bodija Smart City Initiative
