Yesterday another plane crashed. It seems incredible that in a little over a year over 300 people have been killed crashes like this.
I got a call from a friend in Zaria asking if it was true that the Sultan of Sokoto was among the dead. One of the executives of the paper was at the airport and rushed to the scene of the crash. He had helped pull out the Sultan's charred body himself.
I suppose that’s how news really travels in Nigeria. Within minutes it must have spread over the Northern states.
Our reporters had to trek through kilometres of bush to get to the site of the crash, stripping off to ford deep rivers, TV camera men holding their equipment above their heads. One looked very stressed by the experience. He'd seen one of the bodies lying there, virtually torn in half by the seatbelt.
The news editor said today: "It will be tough to get people to talk about the succession. It’s on everybody’s mind, but they won't talk about it for a few days. But right now everyone is thinking about the succession."
Air crashes like this must be one of the only times Nigerian elites can't buy their way out of danger. They can go to Saudi or US hospitals, instead of being forced to use Nigerian ones; send their children to European schools, rather than the Nigerian ones; they can buy their way out of the law, instead of being subject to the mess of a court system that exists here. But if they want to travel they have to place their lives in the hands of a system which is patently not working. I will not be surprised if it is found that safety checks were lacking, and that someone made some money on the side because of it. As Jerry Rawlings famously said: “The fish rots from the head down”.
Incredibly the governor of Kogi state's three daughters all survived the crash. He spent the day giving blood for his daughter in intensive care at the National Hospital. I wonder how long they’ll stay there.