Many ways to die in Nigeria

With innumerable violent but mostly avoidable deaths recorded in Nigeria almost on a daily basis in the past few years, life in the country today has become as described in Thomas Hobbes’ state of nature, where there is “continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”.

It is as captured in the second and fourth stanzas of Oswald Mbuyiseni Mtshali’s ‘Nightfall in Soweto’, where “A murderer’s hand / lurking in the shadows / clasping the dagger / strikes down the helpless victim” and “Man has ceased to be man / Man has become beast / Man has become prey”.

Death, that oft-dreaded existential reality, seems to have been demystified. In today’s Nigeria, even the average life expectancy of 54.5 is no longer realistic as death is ever lurking in the shadows and life is cheap.

What will kill you in Nigeria is always lying in wait by the corner, ever so near. It doesn’t matter in what part of the country you live in – nowhere is safe.

If Boko Haram’s bomb doesn’t kill you in the market, in the church, in the mosque, in the school or other public places, especially if you live in the hotbed north-eastern states of Borno, Adamawa and Yobe States, perhaps because of the reduced frequency of the attacks in recent times, then you must be wary of Hakika, the emergent Islamist sect that is currently occupying large swathes of forests in Nasarawa State.

If you are lucky to escape the AK47s and machetes of killer herdsmen destroying lives and displacing entire communities in the north-central states of Plateau, Benue, Taraba, Nasarawa, Kogi, or even as far down south as Edo, Delta, Anambra, Ekiti, Oyo, Ondo, Enugu, Abia, and so on, you may automatically join the swelling ranks of Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) living in unsanitary, malnutrition-ravaged and mostly neglected camps in many parts of the country and dying by instalment.

Boko Haram killed over 6,600 persons in 2014 alone and has displaced over 2.3 million people since May 2013. Killer herdsmen and Boko Haram insurgents reportedly killed 1,750 Christians and other non-Muslims between January and June 2018, according to a statement by International Society for Civil Liberties and the Rule of Law (Intersociety) early in July. The herdsmen also massacred 8,800 Nigerians, mostly Christians, in three years (June 2015 to June 2018), the statement said.

In May, during the burial of two Catholic priests (Felix Tyolaha and Joseph Gor) and 17 parishioners killed by suspected herdsmen in an early morning raid on St. Ignatius Parish, Mbalom, Samuel Ortom, Benue State governor, claimed that attacks by herdsmen had taken the lives of at least 492 people in Benue in the first five months of the year. On its part, Miyetti Allah Cattle Breeders Association of Nigeria (MACBAN) also claimed it had lost over 500 of its members to reprisal attacks in Plateau, Benue and Taraba States.

If you live in the communities bordering Ebonyi and Cross River, Cross River and Akwa Ibom, and Benue and Cross River States or you are travelling along the routes connecting these border communities, chances are that you will be caught in the endless orgies of violence arising from decades-old border clashes over farmlands. The latest clashes in June left about 20 people dead, numerous injured and over 7,000 displaced.

But if you escape the crossfire here by chance, you may not be so lucky with the armed bandits snuffing the life out of hundreds of your fellow citizens in Zamfara State or the notorious kidnappers, armed robbers and car snatchers on the Abuja-Kaduna highway, the Kaduna-Zaria highway and the Kaduna-Birnin Gwari road, who have built operational bases in the thick wilds of the adjoining states from where they terrorise travellers. Their counterparts are also rampaging in other parts of the country, especially in the South-East and South-South, even though the frequency has reduced.

In August last year, police arrested 40 kidnappers on the Abuja-Kaduna highway and rescued three victims during a raid of their hideouts. Just a few days back, reports had it that Halima Idris, a professor and former Commissioner of Education in Katsina State, was killed alongside three others while travelling to Abuja between Jere and Kateri, about 85km between Abuja and Kaduna.

Those nine Nigerians who died in the tanker explosion on the Otedola Bridge axis of the Lagos-Ibadan Expressway on Thursday, June 28 couldn’t have seen it coming, just as it must have come as a rude shock to owners of the 54 vehicles that were consumed in the ensuing fire. But sadly, their fate is the potential fate of every traveller on Nigeria’s death-traps that pass for roads, where various forms of accidents are not only a reality but imminent.

If you fall sick and you cannot afford medical treatment abroad, make sure to write your will before you go for admission in any Nigerian hospital because there is no guarantee that you will leave the hospital bed alive. If your case is cancer or some other serious case, you may even prefer to die at home than waste money in a hospital in Nigeria. With the health sector getting N356 billion out of a total budget of N9.12 trillion for 2018, it is evident that health care delivery is nonexistent in this country. There may be a few good hospitals, especially privately-owned, but they are the exception rather than the rule.

If the building you live in does not collapse on you, then you must be careful not to step out of your house when it rains or you risk being swallowed up by the flood. A 2017 report from the Federal Ministry of Power, Works and Housing put the total number of collapsed buildings across the country between 2012 and 2016 at 54. But a January 2018 report in the Guardian said a survey of building collapse in 2015 showed that an average of 27 buildings caved in 14 months, out of which 175 deaths occurred and 427 people were injured.

On its part, flood disaster has claimed hundreds of lives across many states in Nigeria in the last few years. In May, the Nigeria Hydrological Agency (NHSA) released the 2018 flood outlooks in 35 states in the country, with a projection that Sokoto, Niger, Benue, Anambra, Niger Delta, Anambra, Ogun-Osun, Cross-River and Yobe States would have high risks of river flooding, while Lagos, Bayelsa, Rivers, Delta, and Ondo States may likely experience coastal flooding. The outlook also indicated that flash and urban flood were expected to occur in Port Harcourt, Sokoto, Lagos, Ibadan, Kaduna, Yola, Abuja, Maiduguri, Makurdi, Calabar, Jos, Owerri, Oshogho, Ilorin, Awka, Abakaliki, Birnin-Kebbi, Kano, Yenogoa, Abeokuta, Ado-Ekiti, Lokoja, Lafia, Nsukka, Gombe, Suleja, Karu, Nyanya, Abaji, Onitsha, Sapele, Hadejia and other major cities with poor drainage. It further said out of the 35 states, 318 local government areas would be affected, while about 78 of them would have high risk of floods.

Residents of Makurdi, the Benue State capital, are still reeling from the pain of last year’s flood disaster in the city which ravaged over 2,000 homes and forced over 100,000 residents to flee their homes.

You may escape the direct impact of the excruciating poverty ravaging the entire country and driving many of your fellow citizens to insanity and suicide as a result of inability to meet basic family needs, but the increasing demands for assistance from relatives who have been reduced to paupers by the harsh economic environment are enough to make you want to take refuge in the bottom of the lagoon, especially if you live in Lagos.

By the way, Nigeria has recorded worsening poverty rates in the past few years, aided by bad economic policies that led to a recession in 2016 which the country is yet to fully pull out of. Every day more Nigerians continue to slide into the squalor of poverty despite more money budgeted and spent annually across all tiers of government.

A report by Brookings Institution in June 2018 showed that Nigeria has overtaken India as the nation with the highest number of extremely poor people. According to the report, Nigeria had about 87 million people in extreme poverty as at the end of May 2018, compared with India’s 73 million, with the number of Nigerians in extreme poverty increasing by six people every minute.

Kofi Annan, seventh Secretary-General of the United Nations, is reputed to have once said, “Extreme poverty anywhere is a threat to human security everywhere.” Any wonder that it was speculated in 2015 that 64 million Nigerians suffer from one form of mental illness or the other deserving attention.

But if you escape all of the above, don’t rejoice yet. You may still fall prey to ritual killers operating mostly in the states of the South-West, or you will die by the bullet of a trigger-happy policeman, or if you are a politician, your opponents will send assassins after you.

In all of this, sadly, the government whose primary duty it is to protect the lives and property of the citizens and ensure their welfare just looks on – either due to cluelessness, gross incompetence, wilful negligence or lack of political will to act. In the end, ordinary Nigerians, as they say in local parlance, are on their own.

CHUKS OLUIGBO