Stowaway: A Reading of Daniel’s Mind before the Flight

How time flies! When Daniel (Ricky) Oikhena’s flight touched down in Lagos from Benin on August 24, 2013 at the end of what was possibly his first ‘air travel’ ever, some 160 million Nigerians were landed in a state of shock. He had, like ectopic pregnancy, coiled his frame into the cavity of the aircraft’s wheels and, at the end of some thirty minutes, defied what logic, science and technology, put together, would advise man against. His flight of adventure – if that phrase suffices – obviously disgusted public sensibility and subsequently provoked diverse dialectical orientations in the form of thoughts and impressions that ricocheted around our threadbare sociopolitical-cum-economic experiences. Despite our inflicted profundity at absorbing growing atrocities, more than a dozen reactions strongly suggested that Daniel took us too far, stretched our experiential limits, in another direction, into a different stratosphere. And when everything is considered, that was possibly his crime. Without a desire to betray this writer’s justifiable cynicism, certain killings and violence motivated by political and religious bigotry, like we witness with disturbing regularity, would be a more familiar, comfortable piece of news to our evolving sense of reality. Not surprisingly, when a certain group awarded Daniel a scholarship, a handful of individuals reacted in ways that were construed as an explicit and unwarranted approval of his act; the rest of us went on to reason that such gestures would encourage other teenagers to the same end and, if they succeed, draw the same accolades and benefits and scholarships upon themselves or bring such a teenager’s life to a fatal end if anything goes wrong in the skies. They contested that instead of a scholarship or any similar gesture, Daniel ought to have been fiercely reprimanded and severely dealt with, perhaps, publicly caned before thousands of his mates for ever daring to take juvenile delinquency to new heights. In various ways, they insisted that he should not be seen or presented as anyone’s hero or champion as his personality now exemplifies what any child should never dream to become or the child any parents should never pray to have. As the condemnation widened, Daniel’s parents were caught in the dragnet. They were blamed for their exceptional ‘failure’ in guiding their son, Daniel, on the road he should take and blamed for instilling in him the tendencies of building castles in the air. Those positions come with their strengths and weaknesses but such are not the purpose of this piece, for this writer has not set out to credit or discredit any views, notwithstanding that Daniel’s act possesses properties that bring to mind the complexities of societal and familial roles and responsibilities. As a whole, the views, comments, editorials and so on and so forth are united in the conclusion that the teenager’s act was the height of all imaginable dangers that anyone would willfully desire to be exposed to. That point admits no converse views. However, let us be generous if not lenient for a moment and dispense with all passionate considerations, or do away with the logical and technical mysteries of Daniel’s flight. When this is granted, we are likely to be left with what this writer has called ‘psycho-existential appraisals’ of that incident. It is a position that leaves us with three elements: Daniel, his mind and man-in-the-world complexities; thereby shutting out such concomitant concerns as security breaches, parental (ir)responsibility, collapse of moral and sociopolitical structures, conspiracy theories and such other accusations. From media reports, nothing implicating was found on Daniel: no drugs and no weapons, apart from the undeniable fact that his ectopic presence on the plane posed a primal danger to the safety of the aircraft and, by extension, lives of the passengers. This is acknowledged once again even though this writer had sought that such a line of argument be diminished. No drugs and no weapons were found on him, which basically meant that Daniel was, to this extent, a victim of his own life-threatening innocence. Obviously, Daniel did not ‘fly’ without a purpose or destination. He revealed that he desired to see and set foot on American soil. At 12, plus or minus, he is not too young to be struck and swept off his feet by the powerful force of a 20th century dream. Again, let us be generous to see the America of Daniel’s dream as the symbolic, concrete object of our or man’s daily dreams and aspirations. America, here, for the rest of us, or for a different Daniel could have been a Mephistophelean career in politics, not least as pursued in this clime; it could have been a meritorious career in the medical profession in which case it would be a choice that prides itself on saving lives. Let us further explore a chasm of pathological ignorance if not innocence in Daniel’s behaviour. He had thought the flight was bound for America, whereas it is common knowledge that Benin airport does not operate a direct flight to God’s own country. If he was aided to fly in the ‘wheel-cavity class’, this writer argues, would the plot have been initiated from Benin airport, thereby adding some thirty minutes of life-threatening risk as against taking off from Lagos? What satisfaction would his accomplices, if there were any, have derived from such a mission which, from investigation, was devoid of any deliberate or premeditated plot to cause the death of several passengers or any intention to use Daniel as an instrument of drug trafficking? From the evil experiences in our society today, there are numerous ‘cost-effective’, ‘lucrative’ ways of wasting the life of a young boy. Furthermore, all dreams and the roads to them present herculean and daunting challenges. Daniel is not too young to know this. Without the financial means of flying legally or the professional capacity of gaining legal entry into America, Daniel could feel his dreams disintegrating and atrophying without help or attention. He must have been scared to death every day of his pre-stowaway life that he could go through this life without ever seeing America or, metaphorically speaking, without realizing his dreams or anybody ever being aware of what he ever dreamt of; he must have been scared to death in ‘the unreasonable silence of the world’. Daniel’s, like the average man’s mind, was fraught with existential anxieties. He was smitten by the propelling force of ‘authentic existence’ and driven to the lengths of his human capabilities. He discovered the tensile quality of human strength and stretched it to global attention. His should not be construed as a young mind’s condemnation of anything Nigerian. Rather, Daniel lent weird wings to our human belief, optimism and determination. He pulled out all the stops; confronted and conquered the feebleness of the human spirit; stretched our consciousness to a new form of reality from which it instantly recovered the moment we stood with mouth agape at this rarest pursuit of a burning desire. ‘Stowaway’ Daniel only demonstrated that it is not enough to dream and desire; it’s not enough, until the world knows that we, as individuals, have tried. He embarked on a raw, scary, dangerous, journey in externalizing his inner desires. He never intended to endanger other people’s lives. He never imagined that his presence on the plane posed a plain, basic risk to the lives of others. The only life he thought he placed on the line was his own; sometimes, too, that may not be true. He was just blatantly oblivious of the other side of it all. His attempt reveals how much of what we suppress or hide in our daily quests and how much closer our dreams could be with just a notch more. The gestures, which have been interpreted as baneful encouragements, do not serve to reward Daniel’s ‘crime’, but – it has to be said – his foray into the uncharted recesses of human exertions. By the way, who would attempt same for a million dollar? The ‘accolades’ merely serve to salute the ‘temper’ that otherwise lies unleashed in the rest of us. Generally speaking, we seem to have arrived at the present time too impaired to attempt the extraordinary, not least, in the context of Daniel’s flight. No case is being made here for a repeat incident even though there have been similar attempts since. Yes, Daniel’s life might have taken a different trajectory for we hear he has been moved to the best public school in his Edo State. That could be considered a great gesture by those on the positive divide of the incident; but this writer considers it inconclusive to Daniel’s ‘flying’ ambition or ‘rehabilitation’. He should have been put on board a US-bound flight and conducted through the processes of embarking on a ‘normal’ trip of such a distance to such a country; he should have been taken there for his education or told more about America in order to remove the creases or stretch marks left on his psychological make-up. All this, it is feared, cannot survive in this clime where life is too preoccupied with embracing and celebrating falsities and other ironies. Except Daniel is satisfied with his post-stowaway life, the slipshod handling of it reaffirms the same socio-spiritual degeneracy that inspired the young boy’s eerie flight. If we were too shocked to believe what he attempted, his rehabilitation programme should equally shock us into the understanding that the human spirit, once stretched, cannot return to its original state and should never be the same again. In all frankness, Daniel ‘Ricky’ Oikhena’s life should not remain the same again for on that day in August, 2013, he rose above all obstacles, which the life he did not choose had placed upon him.