It was Femi or Fourscore, as myself and many others called him, who had sold our Penthouse Flats to Myself and my best friend, Damola Aderemi, whilst he lived across us in another of the four penthouses in the mini-Estate. We also saw Mrs Olukemi Aderemi, and her daughter, Adekepemi, whose maternal grandfather, Chief Obafemi Awolowo (SAN), hailed from the same township of Ikenne, in Ogun State, as Mr Femi Osibona, the owner of the collapsed skyscraper on Gerard Road, Ikoyi. He was busy working the phone making calls to the Lagos State Governor, Mr Babajide Sanwo-Olu, and all The Who is Who in Lagos State. Along the streets, we ran into my neighbour, Mr Olu Akpata, the affable President of the Nigerian Bar Association. Gbenga immediately made a call to a structural Engineer to come and check if the “earthquake” had damaged or weakened our building. My wife was already way ahead of me as I waited for my younger friend, Gbenga Olunloyo to join me. I screamed and started speeding out of the building. “Ajani, Fourscore’s building has disappeared!” my wife screamed… “What is this woman saying?” I soliloquized? Then fearfully and with great trepidation, I peeped out myself and saw the void. “Ajani (her pet name for me) our residents are out of their apartments…” Then she looked skyward and straight across the most imposing edifice in our neighbourhood, a gargantuan edifice that bestrides the landscape of the busy Gerrard Road, that we normally see from our windows, but it was nowhere to be found. I kept screaming at my wife: “Bolaji, earthquake, earthquake, let’s move before the building collapses on all of us.” My wife, who seems to be of much stronger stock than I in these conditions, was already by the window scanning our compound. I dialogued with my feet and started galloping away like an antelope. To say that I was scared is to put it very mildly. This evil explosion was so thunderous that it shook our six-storey building to its foundation and seemed to reverberate forever. I was getting ready to go out when a massive explosion, like a fiendish hurricane raised to the power of thousands, suddenly occurred. Unknown to me, this meticulously planned schedule was not to be

I left the classy party looking forward to a long blissful night as I planned to be in bed till minimum 12 noon on Monday before attending the climate change event at the Italian Consulate on Victoria Island. My Sunday evening was spent at the birthday dinner cum book launch of television star, Ms Kikelomo Atanda-Owo. Just the day before, I had departed Abuja after the PDP National Convention. It was very quickly to become the stuff of permanent nightmares.

Fellow Nigerians, the terrible day, Monday, November 1, 2021, started for me like all of my regular days.

Eso pet health bar