My life is crashed -victim of Makola market fire

Loose tears dripped down the cheeks of Johnson Adetola as he looks at the fire burn away the remaining portion of a wood that was once part of his stall.

Adetola, until last Friday, was hoping to stock his stall with some more jeans trousers and other clothes as the Christmas season approaches, but all of that remain fairy tales he?ll one day live to tell. ?I had six bundles from my suppliers only last week,? he said. ?And I?m about to go for the rest but everything is gone now? he said tearfully as he watched fire raze down the Tema station section of the of the Makola market in the early hours of Friday.

He told the dailyEXPRESS that a colleague at the market gave him a call around 2am informing him that the market was on fire. ?I got off around 3:30am and I realized that the market is burning,? he said while trying to conceal his tears with a smile that betrays his pain and anguish.

Johnson Adetola says he has lost millions of cedis. Other victims have similar stories to tell. One of them was Kofi Asamoah. He deals mainly in ladies wear. According to him, he got the news of the disaster from one of her customers. ?I quickly rushed to this place and you can see that everything is destroyed now.? Asamoah said he has to begin life all over again because his entire investment has been burnt down. Though the actual cause of the fire is yet to be known Mr. Asamoah told the paper ?this is a planned thing.? He said four years ago almost around Christmas the market was gutted by fire and, this time around almost six weeks before the festive season a similar incident has occurred. He attempts to draw comparison between what happened at the Kasoa market and that of Makola. ? In the past this place will burn first before Kasoa, but two weeks ago it was Kasoa and now here. What are they trying to tell us,? he rhetorically added. This view is equally shared by most of the victims. Some of them were busily going through their burnt items with the hope of salvaging items that escaped the fire. Seidu Abdulai is one of several eyewitnesses who spoke to the dailyEXPRESS. According to him he saw the fire around 12am. ?I alerted some friends who also began to scream,? he said. ?I was even here two hours before the fire officers came but they could not immediately do anything.? He said before the officers got to the scene a large portion of the market was already consumed by the fire and the only thing they could do was to prevent the fire from spreading through the STC yard area. A fire officer who spoke to the paper however denied arriving late. According to him the nature of the place makes it difficult for them to have access to the market. ?You can even see from here that we had a difficult task putting off the fire, especially looking at the narrow nature of the gate,? he said under condition of anonymity. The entire market has been razed down with smoke still coming from the items. Bottles of minerals, bars of soap, burnt stereo sound systems and materials were some of the visible items.

One of the victims, a lady, was completely in tears and it had to take an onlooker to console her.

Snippets of information gathered by dailyEXPRESS say the market has not been insured. But this could not however be independently verified. The traders will be meeting the Mayor of Accra this morning to work out some compensation package for them.