The 3rd Eye….. BBM pranksters: The security implication

The use of the Black Berry Messenger to cause panic in the country, especially Lagos State is becoming recurrent. It’s quite sad really, that a sane person could sit somewhere and concoct devilish, imagined occurrences just to scare people witless.
And it’s equally remarkable that once such messages are broadcast, another set of people begin to broadcast such news without first cross checking their facts.
We’re all accepting these BBM pranksters with indulgence and mild anger. The danger in this stupid game is that when the ‘wolf’ finally surfaces and the pranksters begin their broadcast, nobody will believe. Thus such unbelief may eventually lead to avoidable accidents and deaths.
In a nutshell, we should not cry wolf, when there’s no wolf! There had been several of such pranks that I had lost count. There was a time the pranksters posted that there would be an acid rain. It was so widespread that some citizens became apprehensive and paranoid, fearful of even stepping out of their homes.
When it finally rained, I was caught in that downpour. I was at the Landipo area of Ikeja when it started pouring. Even commercial bike riders abandoned their motorbikes and took off. I saw people running like the hounds of hell were after them, just to avoid the rain touching them. Since it was ‘supposedly acid rain, ‘they had conjured and imagined the harm such a rain could do to their skin. Utter rubbish of course! But the fact is that people swallowed it, hook, line and sinker.
The pranksters again came up the story that trucks loaded with Boko Haram members had invaded Lagos through the Lagos/ Ibadan expressway, forcing law enforcement agents to dash to the area. It was also a wolf call! Perhaps the most ridiculous was the broadcast that four men in a black Jeep dropped a headless Lagos State University undergraduate’s corpse, along the long bridge of the Lagos/Ibadan route. People believed and even journalists were asked to investigate.
TO CONTINUE