Last Saturday’s arrest of a teenage aircraft stowaway in Lagos leaves more Nigerians puzzled, writes CHUX OHAI
By a twist of fate, Daniel Ohikhena, the
15-year-old teenager arrested at the Lagos Airport, Ikeja, after he was
spotted emerging from the wheels compartment of a plane belonging to
Arik Air on Saturday, has made history. Today, he is one of the most
‘celebrated’ youths in Africa.
Young Ohikhena’s uncommon adventure is
currently the subject of a raging debate across Nigeria and in many
other parts of the world. It is one of the most discussed issues on the
social media.
Since Saturday, even the foreign print
media have been awash with reports on this ‘super’ teen, who was alleged
to have set out from his residence at No. 6, Ehigiagbe Street, in the
Ekenwan area of Benin City, Edo State, without the knowledge of his
parents and siblings.
Evidently unnerved by the sheer
thoughtlessness of the youth and his survival of the 35-minute flight at
an altitude of over 21,000 feet, many Nigerians still cannot fathom the
reason for his action.
In a story published in The PUNCH on
Monday, Daniel was said to have told sources at the Lagos Airport that
he had wanted to escape parental abuse at home by hiding in the
undercarriage of the plane.
The report said that the boy had also
thought he was actually on a flight heading to the United States of
America. While the parents, who were obviously alerted through relatives
and other sources, were on their way to reclaim him, he was handed over
to men of the Department of State Security for further investigation.
Security breach
Daniel’s action, no doubt, has security
implications serious enough to have compelled the management of Arik Air
to trade blames with the Federal Aviation Authority of Nigeria over the
breach.
In a reaction, FAAN said it had adopted
what it called a risk amelioration processes to safeguard flight
operations’ at all its 22 airports across the country.
“In the meantime, we have adopted risk
amelioration processes to safeguard flight operations. As a result of
this incident in Benin, we have further tightened our risk amelioration
procedure to ensure that a similar incident does not occur,” a senior
official of the agency was quoted as saying.
FAAN said its preliminary investigation had revealed that Arik did not give an accurate account of the Benin Airport incident.
“Our investigations reveal that a
passenger on board the flight called the attention of the cabin crew
while the aircraft was waiting to take off at the threshold of the
runway, to the effect that they had seen a young boy walk under the
aircraft and had not seen him re-appear on the other side.
“The cabin crew in turn informed the
pilots in the cockpit about this. The pilots called the control tower
and asked them to request FAAN to do a sweep of the area after their
departure, opting to carry on with their flight despite the report. Upon
the arrival of the aircraft in Lagos, we were informed that there had
been a stowaway found alive alighting from the wheel well of the
aircraft.
“While FAAN takes this security breach
extremely seriously, we deem Arik’s attempt at indicting and smearing
FAAN as irresponsible. Safety and security breaches occur when all the
checks in the system are beaten. Given that security is a
responsibility for all players in this industry, a critical last
opportunity to detect and prevent this stowaway was offered and had the
airline taken the information by passengers as seriously as they should
have, this incident would have been avoided,” it said.
Other stowaways in history
There is little doubt that if the plane
had been US-bound, Daniel would not have survived the journey. Denied
oxygen at a higher altitude than the one required for the short trip
from Benin to Lagos, he would have died of asphyxia before the plane
arrived at his destination.
But the teenager is not the only African
that has attempted to travel abroad as an aircraft stowaway in recent
times. In September 2012, Jose Matada, 26, from Mozambique, died after
falling from a Heathrow-bound flight from Angola. His body was found on
the pavement of Portman Avenue in Mortlake, south-west London.
About a month earlier, the body of a man
was discovered in the landing gear bay of a British Airways Boeing 747
after a 9,656km flight from Cape Town to Heathrow Airport.
A story published in the British Telegraph names
19-year-old American, Clarence Terhune, as the first aircraft stowaway
in 1928. He was said to have hidden himself on board the LZ 127 Graf
Zeppelin airship, flying from the US to Germany.
In June 2010, a 20-year-old Romanian
survived exceedingly cold temperatures inside the landing gear of a
Boeing 747 on a 97-minute flight from Vienna to Heathrow.
The stowaway was said to have slipped
under a perimeter fence at Vienna Airport before climbing into a wheel
compartment on board the empty privately-owned aircraft.
In 2009, Habib Hussain, a 25-year-old
member of staff at Medina Airport in Saudi Arabia, boarded a
aircraft
bound for Jaipur, India, on the pretence of cleaning it. He hid in the
loo and was only discovered after the plane had taken off.
Similarly, a Cuban named Roberto Viza
Egües managed to flee the country on August 12, 2000, after hiding in an
Air France cargo container at Havana Airport. He arrived in Paris the
following day, suffering from exposure, but otherwise unharmed. His
application for asylum was denied and he was eventually deported back to
Cuba.
Reason for action
Whatever the immediate reason for
Daniel’s actions, it clearly reflects the desperation of millions of
Nigerian youths to flee the dehumanising conditions of living in the
country.
Deprived of jobs and basic amenities, as
well as driven by hunger and poverty, the average Nigerian youth often
dreams of leaving the country at the slightest opportunity and going in
search of the proverbial greener pastures abroad by any means possible.
Although he is relatively young, it is
not unlikely that Daniel may have nursed similar dreams. Yet, the boy’s
action is not different from several attempts by other Nigerian youths
in the past to cross into Europe through perilous tracks in the Sahara
Desert.
What factors could have remotely driven
the teenager into risking his life in such a potentially dangerous
adventure? Apparently determined to find the answer to this puzzle,
operatives of the DSS quizzed the boy’s mother, Mrs. Evelyn Ohikhena, on
Monday.
When asked to describe his son, the
woman, who seemed confused by the development, had said Daniel was a
nice boy who avoided the company of bad boys.
“He is always at home. I have never seen
anybody come to look for him and he doesn’t have friends. I am begging
the government to help me because I have never been to the airport
before. So, they should help me out as I don’t know how he managed to
get there. I just thank God that he is alive. But I am surprised how he
had the mind to do that I have been suffering to take care of them. The
only thing is that I don’t joke with my children’s education. I give
them the best education. Everybody knows me. Go and ask of me in Oba
market. The only thing I bother myself with now is how my daughter will
go to school,” she had said.
While investigation continues, it is
difficult to establish if Daniel’s claims of parental abuse are true or
false. But, in a telephone interview with our correspondent on Tuesday,
Professor Mopelola Omoegun of the
University of Lagos suggested that the
teenager might be mentally unhinged to have contemplated running away
from home as an aviation stowaway.
Omoegun said it was unnatural for a
youth of his age not to consider the consequences of hiding inside the
undercarriage of an aircraft before embarking on the journey.
“It is unusual for a boy of his age to
think of such an adventure without fear of the consequences. This is a
sure sign of mental imbalance,” she said.
The academic also said that Daniel could
be driven to act in that way by parental neglect or abuse. “If he is a
victim of neglect or parental abuse, he may have been driven by the urge
to escape his condition and seek elsewhere,” she added.
Also, Daniel’s action could have been
influenced by a possible exposure to narcotics. But, so far, there is no
evidence pointing to that yet.{PUNCH}
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