Nearly a week after their son, Chukwuemeka Okoro, 4, was swept away by floodwaters in a Lagos neighborhood, the boy’s parents and neighbors are still distressed by their failure to locate his body.
According to The PUNCH, Okoro fell into a canal at Nobel Street last week Tuesday and was swept away through a neighboring drainage in the Onibata neighborhood, both in the Ogba district of Lagos.
The incident is alleged to have happened during a rainfall in the neighborhood on Tuesday.
Okoro was alleged to be standing at the edge of a drainage on Nobel Street in Ogba when the flood carried him into a canal that led to the Onibata settlement.
Journalists who visited the scene on Friday saw no few than 20 volunteer members of the family and residents, combing the area in a frantic search for Okoro’s body.
Efforts to recover his body had yielded no results as of the time of reporting this article.
Okoro’s anguished father, Ikechukwu, told journalists that he wanted to retrieve his son’s remains so that the family may perform the funeral rites as prescribed by tradition.
He said, “We are so sad. We have not been able to report this incident to the authority because we have been busy looking for the boy. We were more than 50 yesterday (Thursday). I don’t think you can step your feet in the canal. We are yet to find his body.
“There was a lady here that promised that she was going to inform the authority about the incident, but we never heard anything about it since then. What we are now seeking is to see the body and perform our traditional rite.
“From Onibata here, the search has led us to Alagbole. We also went to Akintolu. It was when we got there that the residents in the area told us that the river did not flow to the area and that it diverted somewhere else. We have even extended our search to Kara, hoping to see him, but nothing came out of it.”
Also a resident of Onibata community stated that the community its pleas to the Lagos State Government to build a proper drainage system has continued to fall on dear ears.
The resident said, “Over time, we have called the government’s attention to all these things. It has been one promise after the other. When we get to the height of the rainy season, water always entered people’s houses from the canal. Although the marking has been done by way of a barrier, work is yet to commence.
“This is the rainy season; government should come and do something before it gets to a stage where water will be carrying everybody away from their apartment. Sometimes, you see pythons and other reptiles entering people’s homes. We hope they can expedite action on this canal. The makeshift bridge between Onibata and Ogundimu is no longer passable.”
When contacted, a spokesperson for the Lagos State Emergency Maintenance Agency, Nosa Okunbor, stated that the agency was not aware of the event.
