The deaths of some buyers of rice at Nigeria Customs Service office in Yaba area of Lagos State has excited response from the Service.
The latter embarked on sale of seized food items from smugglers across the country to palliate the suffering of the greater number of Nigerians amids high cost of living.
That of Yaba turned tragic with seven persons reportedly died in the stampede due to unruly crowd struggling to have their turn individually, one of whom is said to be a grassroots politician and member of the ruling All Progressives Congress in the state, named, Comfort Adebanjo(pictured above).
Customs via its spokesman, Abdullahi Maiwada, absolved itself of blame saying it was down to impatience of recalcitrant crowd.
Maiwada told Punchng this saying, “At a point, they decided to be impatient. When we saw the crowd, we even suspended the collection of forms and said, ‘Let’s give them free’. We did that, we exhausted everything. After exhausting everything and we told them everything had finished, and that they could go, that we didn’t have any more, they persisted. Some of them broke the fence of that place. We had to put some barricades to cover the area. Some of them went and entered the container. At a point, we used our ambulance, and took them to hospital.”
