This story appears in our print issue, ‘
100 Years of Ladi Kwali: Stories from Another Nigeria’
. Buy here. On the morning of 26 August 2011, Dr Tunde Adegboyega, a physician and public health expert, arrived at his fourth-floor office shortly after 7:30 a.m. He worked as a medical officer with the World Health Organization (WHO), one of several United Nations agencies housed in the five-storey complex alongside the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), United Nations Population Fund, United Nations Development Programme, and the International Labour Organization. Having joined WHO in 2001, he was steadily building a career in international public health.
About 400 staff worked at the United Nations House in Abuja, but that Friday was unusually busy. An inauguration ceremony for newly elected executives of the WHO Staff Association was scheduled to take place, drawing staff from the 36 sub-offices across the country, one in each state. Dr Adegboyega chose to skip the event so he could prepare for a meeting he had scheduled later that morning at the Federal Ministry of Health.
At around 9:30 a.m., he took the elevator down to the Standard Chartered Bank cashpoint located on the ground floor of the building to send some money to his wife in Lagos. When the WHO country office relocated from Lagos to Abuja in 2004, he had made the difficult decision to move alone, leaving his family behind to avoid disrupting their routine and the children’s schooling. As a result, sending money and handling small financial matters from afar had become a normal part of his day-to-day.
Inside the cashpoint, three people stood in line with him. A UNICEF staff member was ahead of him, while two others, one from WHO and another from UNICEF, stood behind. When it was his turn, Dr Adegboyega struggled to remember the final two digits of his wife’s account number. After two unsuccessful attempts to reach her by phone, his frustration became visible. Jumoke, the bank manager, whom he had become acquainted with through his frequent visits, noticed and stepped in to help, and they moved aside from the queue.
Dr Adegboyega recalled a sudden flash of light tearing through the room. The lights dimmed instantly, followed by a violent force that slammed into his body. The office had been torn apart, and the two other staff members around him were so badly injured they could not move. He could still move and crawled through what remained of the cash point, following the flickering light from outside until he reached open ground. There, he saw injured and unconscious bodies scattered around him, some of them people he recognized. Around them, a crowd wailed in panic and confusion.
‘At that point, I had so much adrenaline in me,’ he told me, ‘I did not think about my own injuries, which were mild.’ He had a broken finger with crushed tissue and lacerations on his back. As one of the few doctors on the scene before emergency responders arrived, he began assisting the wounded.
It was amid the chaos that he learned what had happened. A dark ash-coloured 1996 Honda ‘Hala’ Accord station wagon had sped in from the direction of the United States Embassy, located next to the UN House in Abuja’s Diplomatic Zone, rammed through the UN House exit gate, and crashed into the ground-floor reception area, about 30 metres from where he stood at the cashpoint.
‘I never watched the CCTV footage because after that, life became something else,’ he said. ‘But people I spoke to said they thought it was an accident, like a brake failure.’ According to official records, about ten seconds passed between the crash and the explosion, when the driver stepped out of the vehicle, opened the trunk and detonated a bomb.
‘I was bleeding seriously, but not to the point where I would lose my life,’ Dr Adegboyega explained. ‘I was more concerned about those in critical condition.’ When ambulance vehicles arrived, he helped load the injured, only leaving with the last vehicle to the hospital.
When news of the explosion reached the National Hospital, Abuja’s largest public hospital, located about five kilometres from the site of the attack, Dr Oluwole Olaomi was out of town. Dr Olaomi was the hospital’s head of trauma and accident and emergency services and the only formally trained trauma surgeon in Abuja.
‘My phone kept going off,’ he recalled. ‘I was out of town, but I was in control of what was happening on the ground.’
Four patients underwent surgery immediately. Others were operated on later, while some were transferred abroad for better treatment. Although Dr Olaomi was not on duty that morning, there were general and orthopaedic surgeons present. His role was to oversee triage in the emergency unit and coordinate care across departments.
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