How I escaped death in a helicopter crash that killed Army chief – Otti

BY OUR REPORTER

But for Providence, the All Progressives Grand Alliance (APGA) gubernatorial candidate in the 2019 election in Abia State, Dr. Alex Otti, would have been aboard the crashed helicopter that killed former Chief of Defence staff and later National Security Adviser, General Andrew Owoeye Azazi.

Azazi, also a former Chief of Army Staff, died December 15, 2012 along with Governor Patrick Yakowa of Kaduna State in a naval helicopter crash, in Okoroba Village, Bayelsa State, on his way to Port Harcourt Airport, after attending the funeral of Oronto Douglas’s father. Douglas, now late, was a senior aide to then President Goodluck Jonathan.

Otti who described the retired late military chief as “my friend and brother” recalled their last moments together in his fortnightly column, Outside the Box, published in today’s edition of THISDAY.

“Late Gen. Andrew Owoye Azazi (1952-2012) was my friend and brother. We had had dinner in a Lagos restaurant with Herbert Wigwe, then Deputy CEO of Access Bank, two days before the helicopter crash that took his life and that of another friend, Governor Patrick Yakowa of Kaduna State.

“We concluded the dinner with an agreement to fly to Port Harcourt together very early on Saturday, December 15, 2012. He was going further to Bayelsa to attend the burial of the father of Douglas Uranta while I was headed to Okirika to attend the burial of the parents of my friend Ben Willie, whose parents were so united even in death that the father literally followed his mum, when the news of the departure of the latter was broken to the former. Ben Willie and his family decided to bury them together on the same day.

“We had planned that I would accompany Gen. Azazi to Bayelsa and he would join me thereafter, to Okirika and we both would finally pass the night in Port Harcourt.

“As providence would have it, I overslept on that fateful day. When Gen Azazi arrived at the airport and couldn’t find me, he placed a call to me and I apologized, pleading that our earlier programme be changed so that he would proceed to Bayelsa while I would go to Okirika and meet up with him in Port Harcourt later in the day.

“That meeting never happened as it turned out that the helicopter in which he was traveling back to Port Harcourt from Bayelsa had crashed. The news of the helicopter crash came piecemeal until finally, it was confirmed that no one survived the mishap.

“Although Gen. Aziza is gone, some of his words live and will continue to teach us some basic and inconvertible lessons.

“A few months before his death, General Azazi had spoken at a South South Economic Summit where he removed his toga of officialdom, being the then National Security Adviser, to say it as it was. He blamed the insecurity in the land, which then was assuming unacceptable proportions, on politicians.

“He had actually called out PDP which was the ruling party at that time. I was in the hall when he made this statement which attracted large applause from the audience. The then President, Goodluck Jonathan and the PDP apparently took up arms against the General as he was subsequently removed as National Security Adviser and Colonel Sambo Dasuki was appointed in his stead.

“One of the profound things that Azazi said and which struck me was that it normally took a very long time for people to decide to go into violence. He charged everyone to brace up for tougher times security-wise and adjust ourselves to live with more and more insecurity for a long time to come.

“He argued that once this kind of violence was allowed to start, it became very difficult to stop. His prediction was not only correct, but everyone will agree that banditry has assumed such a frightening dimension that no day passes without at least one tale of large-scale violence from one part of the country or another.

“One other prediction that Gen. Azazi made which has come true is that while the violence was localized in the North East then, it was only a question of time before it spread to other parts of the country,” Otti recounted.

*Read more: https://www.thisdaylive.com/index.php/2019/06/24/illiteracy-ignorance-poverty-banditry/