Today, we celebrate international women’s day but Nigeria is so bent on failing young women and it is surprising to see that the BRT bus isn’t safe anymore. Like the story of Iniobong Umoren, Nigeria has failed another young woman, some weeks ago I complained about how it just ends at the #tags and nothing more and we give these monsters reasons to continue to cause havoc because they know our leaders won’t do more than the usual, they don’t really care. All they do is come up with a speech every damn time cruel things happen to innocent people and they promise us justice that we have never gotten and closure to the victims that they never get. Another young lady has been killed and vital parts of her body mutilated.
The 22-year-old Oluwabamise Toyosi Ayanwole, who filmed herself in a BRT bus in Lagos as she felt uneasy about the driver’s movement and because lights were turned off in the BRT bus, has been found dead.
Oluwabamise Toyosi Ayanwole, took a BRT bus with number 240257 from Chevron bus stop, Lekki, going to Oshodi at about 7p.m. on Saturday, February 26, 2022, on her way home from work.
At exactly 5:17p.m on the 6th of March 2021, I took a break from work to surf the internet and view statuses since I was having a really choked up day and I needed to distract myself before going back to face my work, I saw the post of my friend who was complaining bitterly about the BRT bus and how Nigeria is no longer safe and things are getting worse by the day, he moved further to say that a BRT driver and some guys killed an innocent woman who was just coming back after hustling in this “rat hole” called Lagos state.
My friend was in a great rage I could feel from the tone of his words on his status that he was and is still disappointed and unhappy about what happened because to my friend even the BRT is no longer safe nothing is safe anymore and nowhere is actually safe and it is unfair to be a citizen of a country like Nigeria, a nation where our leaders are so uninterested in the welfare of their citizens.
For some reason I couldn’t just ignore the post or mind my business as most Nigerians would say but this particular post touched me, a person was killed, innocently, brutally killed in a BRT bus? How? why?
I couldn’t understand how this happened, I only just saw my friend’s post about the incident, so I decided to ask my friend, I apologized to him for having a bad day and then asked him what happened and he said to me “a BRT driver and some guys killed a woman”.
I already knew this obviously from his post that someone had died, I wanted to know how; was it a mistake? Was there an accident? Were they fighting? What exactly happened? How did a human being die in a BRT bus? I knew my friend wasn’t ready to answer those extra questions. He was already in a bad mood and I needed to also go back to my work because my boss already called me too, so to end the conversation I said to him “I still don’t get how, no vex. I want to ask more questions but I don’t want to disturb you, I am really sorry about the experience today”.
Usually, I would check the internet about news like this to get the whole detail but I didn’t have the time to do that yesterday, and I got back really late from work and all I needed to do was rest for another day. Waking up this morning the first thing I did was to look up the BRT story on the internet. This was how I got the entire gist of everything that happened and again, I am angry.
Can Nigeria surprise me for once? This story is horrific. It made me question my own safety, that of my friends and family members too. If this could happen to innocent Oluwabamise Toyosi Ayanwole, who was found dead after boarding a BRT bus on her way home from work then it could happen to anyone.
I got the BRT voucher one of the times I traveled to Lagos and needed to attend an event in Lekki and I was advised to use BRT since it’s safer and cheaper and this incident got me thinking about Nigeria, this could have been any girl or anyone who uses the BRT bus. Now, the BRT bus is no longer safe!
Our society is so messed up right now that anyone is seen as a threat, an eye witness made a comment on Twitter confirming that she was alive when they threw her down from the BRT bus and that he and some others, wanted to take her to the hospital but they were prevented by others at the scene who accused them of
wanting “to use her remaining” and that was how she died at the spot she was dumped.
Nigerians are really tired of waking up to painful stories like, our leaders must act, they have to be intentional about protecting lives and properties, they have to give justice to all the victims, families of people killed for no just reason deserve closure.
Our leaders need to get to the root of this menace, we need to arrest the actual ritualists, the masterminds behind this not just the errand boys executing their evil plans, yes the driver has been caught but they will always devise new means of executing their devilishly plights, employ new boys and pay them to carry out evil, unemployment is a case study so people will fall for jobs like this just to cater for their needs. A lot needs to change, today, it is Bamise, it could be another person tomorrow and another if nothing is done.
