The Ondo Air Crash: Mourning Is Not Enough

On Monday, a Nigerian Air Force ATR-42 aircraft, NAF 931, took off from Benin on what the Air Force described as a routine mission to Lagos. It never got to Lagos. The plane went down in the swamps of Igbokoda, Ilaje Local Government Area of Ondo State, and all 25 people on board, five crew members and 20 passengers, died.
Routine mission. Those two words have refused to leave my head all week.
There were no Boko Haram fighters on that route. No bandits on motorcycles, no anti-aircraft guns, no enemy fire. A military transport plane flying between two of our busiest cities, inside our own airspace, on a Monday, fell out of the sky. When a soldier falls at the frontline in Borno, we bu...