Tributes have been pouring in for David Ntekim-Rex, a 22-year-old tech entrepreneur in Lagos who was shot dead by robbers in Jibowu axis of Yaba area.
Co-founder of an immigration tech firm Tunde Omotoye said David was recently employed to head a unit of his company before his death.
“This is so sad and I am actually speechless,” Omotoye tweeted. “I got introduced to David just on Tuesday. He joined a startup team I belong to as Head, Product Design.
“The system has indeed failed David. It has failed him & his family totally. I pray his family finds the strength for this loss.”
David is one of the two Nigerians that won at the annual Master the Mainframe competition organized by AngelHack, a global hackathon company and the IBM Z Academic Initiative in March 2018.
How ‘we’ lost David
David, according to a Twitter user Roy Mustang, was on his way home from work on Friday night when the robbers attacked and shot him dead.
Mustang said the police were called to the scene while David was gasping for breath but could not aid his transfer to a nearby hospital.
“The Nigerian police stood and watched as he gasped for air,” Mustang tweeted. “They took pictures instead, and were more concerned with why he – a tech guy- was carrying a laptop.”
He explained that David was taken to the “military hospital around the area, the nurses ignored him. The doctor came around and kept asking who they all were. It took a senior nurse to come out and start checking for a pulse.” Mustang claimed that David had lost a lot of blood at this point.
“The police then took David and his family to Sabo, where they looked for the laptop that he had on him instead of giving them a police report. He was finally released to his family, and they got to LUTH around 12:30 am.
“David wasn’t attended to by the doctors at LUTH. He was there till the family was convinced he couldn’t be alive because he had no pulse. The doctors refused to administer any test to see if he was alive.”
David’s death like many others that happened in the country could be attributed to the failed security structure. Many helpless Nigerians like David are left to deal with the effects of a poor policing system and government policies that make the environment unsafe.