What can Evangelist Wilson Bala, a retired Chief Superintendent of Police, do again today after several attempts have been fruitless? Not that he has resigned to fate in his search for his missing son but the retired police officer can no longer sleep early. He sleeps late because sleep won’t just come early. To kill boredom, he reads newspapers that he gets from a woman who owns a provision shop near his house at the Anguwan Kashua area in Bauchi metropolis.
When he wakes up in his modest four-bedroom house, he feels a sense of loss. He gets out of bed, calls his wife and children for morning prayers and the head of the family reads the bible and shares the word. The main prayer point remains unchanged: Oh God, let Wilson find peace wherever he is until we see again. Bala, in his late 60s, takes his bath and his breakfast of coffee and bread with some stew. The emptiness creeps in again. he then picks the phone and calls his lawyer or Wilson’s colleagues in the Navy for any word on his missing son.
Bala, who says he puts his faith in God absolutely, wants to know what has happened to his son, who suddenly disappeared from the navy. Is he dead or alive? Why won’t the navy or anybody tell him where Wilson is? But he has not got answers to the questions regarding his son’s whereabouts.
The nearly six feet tall ex-policeman feels let down by a country he served diligently for almost 35 years before his retirement. “It is very painful that even where he worked before he disappeared has not deemed it fit to officially let me know what happened to my son,” he laments.
If you look closely, you will see a tear form in his left eye but he fights to control his emotions, apparently believing that he can handle the pain that the sudden disappearance of his son has wrought on the family.
What’s his next step? Bala tells Daily Sun that he has done everything possible to get answers but has not succeeded. “I have written several letters to the Nigeria Chief of Naval Staff over the mysterious disappearance of my son, who is serving with the navy,” he says. He recalls a letter addressed to the naval chief over his missing son, Lmea Wilson Sunday, who enlisted into the Nigerian Navy on February 9, 1998. He opens a file and brings out the letter entitled: MYSTERIOUS DISAPEARANCE OF MY SON, LMEA WILSON SUNDAY E4080, A NAVAL OFFICER HAILED FROM HONG LGA OF ADAMAWA STATE.” “I am yet to hear any news since I sent this letter dated March 28, 2011,” he says.
The man disclosed in the letter that his son, Wilson Sunday, aged 33, enlisted with SSCE and undertook his basic training at the Nigerian Naval Engineering College, Naval Base, New Port, Ogorode, Sapele in Delta State.
The letter reads in part: “After he finished his basic training, he was then stationed in Lagos. He has served twelve (12) years in the Nigerian Navy. On 23/6/2010, I received a phone call from my brother, who is resident at Kwakwah, my home town in Hong Local Government Area of Adamawa State, informing me that he heard from a friend in Lagos that my son, Wilson Sunday, left his house on June 20, 2010 and had not returned home. He wanted to know whether we heard the news in Bauchi where I am resident with my family after my retirement from the Nigeria Police Force. I did not receive such news from the Nigerian Navy.”
Bala is sad that since the mysterious disappearance of his son last June, the family has not received any official report from the Nigerian Navy. He opines: “I had asked one of my sons to travel to Lagos to where he was working for the past 12 years to find out the true situation of my missing son, Wilson Sunday, but no useful information has been supplied to him by the naval authorities. He had to come back to Bauchi. After some time, he went back to Lagos, yet no tangible information about my son’s whereabouts up till this time of writing. Since June 20, 2010. Nothing was heard or received about my missing son.”
The retired policeman says after pressure was mounted on the Nigerian Navy, the only response the family got from them was that they were investigating the case. He’s shocked that the result of the investigation was yet to be communicated to the family.
Bala says after all efforts to get information from the Nigerian Navy failed, he wrote another letter to the Chief of Naval Staff, Abuja, with reference number ISBC/MI/2010 through the family’s lawyer on October 22, 201O.
The letter was copied to the Chief of Defence Staff, Nigerian Army Headquatres, Abuja, the Commissioner of Police, Lagos, the Senate, the House of Representatives and the Adamawa State House of Assembly.
He says: “By this letter, we in the family thought that the Chief of Naval Staff would look into the case and order for appropriate investigation to bring to light the truth of the case. But to my greatest surprise, until the time of writing, there was no response from the Chief of Naval Staff, Abuja.
“Now it is with a heavy heart that I am writing to notify the Nigerian Navy through the national dailies of the trauma we in the family are going through in respect of the search for my son, LMEA Wilson Sunday, who mysteriously disappeared about 10 months ago“Yet as if nothing had happened, the navy kept silence about it since then. And the result of the purported investigation is yet to be made known to members of the family. In this respect, Nigerians would agree with me that there is no trauma that is more than an emotional/psychological one.”
The aggrieved dad queried: “The question we in the family are still asking is: Where is the whereabouts of Wilson Sunday? What happened to him? I feel we in the family are entitled to receive answers to these questions. And if he is dead, I think the family members are also entitled to know and to receive possibly a letter of condolence from the Nigerian Navy. I pray for the intervention of Almighty God.”
No comments:
Post a Comment