What manner of Government…

I don’t know if we have been cursed with the fire brigade spirit. I don’t know why it takes disasters to make our government to move. And even when they move, it is so so clumsy.The recent spate of air crashes has been so devastating to the psyche of some regular air men like me. As a matter of fact, I haven’t been near an air plane since October 22 but I don’t know how long I can stay away.

It is instructive to note that people have been talking about our flying coffins for so long and yet the govt never did anything until planes started falling out of the sky. In fact, we could apportion more blame to the Obasanjo govt because we elected them to be our voice. He was given the mandate to select good people for the aviation sector and also powers to remove them. If he now fails to do that until disasters came knocking despite all the noise made, then he could be counted as negligent.

Now we have lost people. We have lost good people. I still had a dinner with a family a week before the husband/father perished in the Bellview crash. Good family with great potentials. The wife is a young beautiful woman but now, she a widow to take care of her daughter alone.

Look at Pastor Bimbo ‘Bims’ Odukoya. Never known anyone speak evil of her. She’s touched more lives than Obasanjo could touch in a 100 lives times combined together. Now she’s gone. Who will take up her ministry? Who will counsel those in emotional pain? I know God has a lot of people that could take over but that is not a consolation for just losing great people carelessly like that.

I live around the airport and everyday, my fear is that a plane should not fall over my roof. I tried to get insurance but the insurance dudes won’t insure me against diving aircrafts.

Now, I ask, why don’t these aviation people themselves ever die in crashes? Wouldn’t it have been better if all the people that died are the bad and corrupt  politicians in Nigeria?

I still don’t know why angels die and the devils live for so long….

Author: Adedeji Olowe

Adédèjì is the founder of Lendsqr, the loan infrastructure fintech powering lenders at scale. Before this, he led Trium Limited, the corporate VC of the Coronation Group, which invested in Woven Finance, Sparkle Bank, Clane, and L1ght, amongst others. He has almost two decades of banking experience, including stints as the Divisional Head of Electronic Banking at Fidelity Bank Plc. He drove the turnaround of the bank’s digital business. He was previously responsible for United Bank for Africa Group’s payment card business across 19 countries. Alongside other industry veterans, he founded Open Banking Nigeria, the nonprofit driving the development and adoption of a common API standard for the Nigerian financial industry. Beyond open APIs, Adédèjì works deeply within the fintech ecosystem; he’s the board chairman at Paystack. Adédèjì is a renowned fintech pundit and has been blogging on technology and payments at dejiolowe.com since 2001.

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