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 bury him as a hero who died fighting for his country. When airmen and civilians die on a short hop from Benin to Lagos, the nation is entitled to ask harder questions. And we must ask them now, before the flags go back up and everybody moves on to the next scandal.

Let me be clear from the start. I am not an aviation engineer, and I will not pretend to know what brought down NAF 931. Nobody does yet. The Air Force has appealed to Nigerians to avoid speculation and the circulation of unverified information, and on this one I am with them. Some of the theories I have seen on WhatsApp since Monday belong in a Nollywood script, not in a national conversation. But asking questions is not the same thing as speculation. Asking questions is what a serious country does when it loses 25 citizens in one afternoon.

Behind the number 25 are human beings. The flight captain was Squadron Leader MI Aburime. His co-pilot, Squadron Leader Ahamefule Man-Ugwueje, had married a fellow officer, Flight Lieutenant Damilola Adekunle, on September 19. Sixteen days. That is how long the marriage lasted. Premium Times reported that he was the son of a retired Group Captain, from a family woven into the Air Force for two generations. I read that story twice and had to put my phone down. Some of the passengers were civilians, family members of personnel, people who boarded a military plane trusting that the men in uniform would get them home.

Rescuers could only reach the crash site by canoe because of the swamp, and the recovery has been slow and painful. Ondo State Governor Lucky Aiyedatiwa confirmed early on that there were no signs of survivors.

Then came the confusion over numbers. The Minister of Aviation and Aerospace Development, Festus Keyamo, initially said 32 people were on board, 25 passengers and seven crew. The Air Force later corrected this to 25, five crew and 20 passengers, and released the names. It is a small thing, you might say. It is not small. In any air disaster, the first thing that must be right is the manifest. If, in the first 24 hours, the minister and the Air Force cannot agree on how many people were on a plane, that tells you something about how information moves between our aviation authorities.

To be fair, the response from government has been quick, and I commend it. President Bola Tinubu declared three days of national mourning and directed a thorough investigation to establish what happened and prevent a recurrence. The Chief of the Air Staff, Air Marshal Sunday Kelvin Aneke, ordered a full investigation into the circumstances of the crash and pledged support to the bereaved families. Keyamo paid a condolence visit to the Air Chief, and both men announced a new framework for closer cooperation between civil and military aviation on airworthiness, certification, training and safety. That last one is the most important announcement of the week, and I hope it does not end at the press briefing.

Even the campaign trail paused. The SDP presidential campaign suspended its activities over the crash. In a season where politicians will use anything for a soundbite, that was a decent gesture.

But here is my problem. We have heard “an investigation has been ordered” before. Many times.

Let me refresh your memory. On February 21, 2021, a Nigerian Air Force Beechcraft King Air 350i crashed near Abuja shortly after reporting engine failure, killing all seven people on board. That plane was heading to Minna. As a Niger State man, that one hit close to home. The then Chief of the Air Staff ordered an immediate investigation. Five years later, I ask a simple question, and I ask it in good faith: how many ordinary Nigerians have read the findings of that investigation? How many of the families have?

This is not an isolated case. We have counted nine military aircraft crashes and major incidents between 2021 and 2026, with 63 deaths, and that tally did not even include Monday’s crash. The figure at no fewer than 1iscrashes and 68 deaths since 2021. The report estimates the aircraft lost in those incidents at N34.8 billion. The ICIR, going back to 2015, counted at least 60 people killed in military air crashes before Monday. The Igbokoda crash is now the deadliest air accident in Nigeria since the Dana Air disaster of 2012.

And as if to underline the point, barely 48 hours after NAF 931 went down, another Air Force aircraft was forced to make an emergency landing in Benue State on Wednesday. Thank God nobody died. But a country that takes safety seriously should treat that near-miss as a second alarm bell, not a footnote.

Older readers will remember September 26, 1992, when a C-130 Hercules crashed in Ejigbo, Lagos, shortly after take-off and killed all 159 people on board, most of them military officers. A whole generation of officers wiped out in one afternoon. Thirty-four years later, we are still burying airmen, still declaring days of mourning, still ordering investigations.

Now, I know the counter-argument, and it deserves a fair hearing. Military aviation is risky everywhere. Our Air Force is fighting insurgency in the North-East, banditry in the North-West and North-Central, and oil theft in the Niger Delta, all at once. Aircraft are flying more hours than they were designed for. Some information cannot be made public without exposing operational details to the very criminals the Air Force is fighting. All of that is true, and I don’t dismiss it.

But it does not explain everything. Nobody is asking the Air Force to publish its flight plans for Sambisa. What Nigerians want to know is simpler. Was the aircraft due for maintenance? Were spare parts available, or did somebody cannibalise one plane to keep another flying? Were the crew rested? What did the flight data recorder show? You can answer those questions and black out every sensitive detail. When a civilian plane crashes in Nigeria, the Nigerian Safety Investigation Bureau investigates and publishes its findings for the public to read. Why should the men and women who fly for the republic, and the civilians who fly with them, deserve less transparency than passengers on a commercial airline?

I strongly believe secrecy is the enemy of safety. When an accident report stays inside a drawer at the Air Force headquarters, the lessons stay in that drawer too. The next crew does not learn. The procurement officer who bought substandard parts does not get caught. The commander who approved a flight that should never have taken off gets promoted. That is how nine crashes become ten, and ten become eleven.

There is also the matter of money, and nobody likes to talk about it. Maintaining aircraft is expensive, and most of the spare parts are paid for in dollars. With the naira where it has been for the past three years, I would like to know whether the Air Force’s maintenance budget has kept pace with the exchange rate. The National Assembly passes defence budgets every year. Our lawmakers should summon the Chief of the Air Staff, not for a photo-op, but for a closed-door session on fleet airworthiness, and then tell Nigerians what they found.

So what should happen now? The Air Force should give itself a deadline, say six months, and publish the findings of the Igbokoda investigation, redacted where it must be, but published. The new civil-military framework Keyamo and Aneke announced should go further and allow the Nigerian Safety Investigation Bureau to sit in on military crash investigations as an independent eye. Any aircraft in the fleet that is overdue for major maintenance should be grounded until it is fixed, no matter how badly the theatre commanders need it. And the promise of support to the bereaved families must arrive as money in their accounts and school fees for their children, not as another condolence letter in a brown envelope two years later.

With the presidential election less than 100 days away, I would also like to hear from the candidates. Everybody is promising to end insecurity. Very well. Ask them how they intend to keep the men and women fighting that insecurity alive when they board a plane at Benin airport on a Monday. Ask them how many aircraft in our fleet can fly safely today, and what they will do about the ones that cannot.

Three days of mourning will end. The flags will go back up. The politicians will return to their rallies, and by next month, Igbokoda will be a name most Nigerians struggle to remember. But a young bride in uniform will not forget. Neither will 24 other families.The 25 people on board NAF 931 deserve more than a minute’s silence and a flag at half-mast. They deserve answers, and the next crew deserves a safer aircraft. These are the issues.