Abandoned in death, possibly in life too!
There is something funny this job does to you! I mean this job of almost permanently training your eyes on a screen and having your fingers in the ‘roast crayfish’ position while bent over a desk in the name of work! I can ‘see’ that you are laughing. But never mind; it’s not always going to be your liberty to laugh at me while I am presiding over this august meeting. Remember that as chief indulgee, I can invoke that suspension clause that gives me unlimited powers to ensure that your privileges are removed for as long as I like. And if you think that you can challenge my powers, then it would be because you are a little shy of ignorance regarding the immunity clause that allows me to roam about like a raging bull looking for something or someone to wrestle down! While it is normal to expect a typical journalist to be an incurable poke-nosing, inquisitive, curious type, you’ll find that if you are not naturally gifted in that department, you are either going to fail in this job or you are going to have to learn to be, the hard way!
It would seem the more inquisitive, poke-nosing and curious you are, the more successful you are likely to be. And this curiosity can sometimes lead you to certain things, certain situations, and certain people you would ordinarily not wish for. Well, it’s not always that bad – I mean not wanting to be in certain places, see certain people or certain things! It’s not all the time that you get into trouble, I mean. But it’s your curiosity that just leads you along anyway! And it could come to you any-which-way! I have been at my ‘curious best’ this past week and I am going to report myself to fellow indulgees, how something that I found to be shocking, allowed my curiosity to get the better of me. Aha! Now, I see that you are getting your mojo back on the singular thought that something got the better of me – Chief Indulgee. You are thinking that because I am about to openly make a confession, by saying that “I want to report myself”, I must have been in some serious trouble! Now, you lie! You lie very well. Any attempt or attempted attempts (that was a common fun-phrase in my time at an original Nigerian university – I can’t tell what guys on campus do these days) to use this volunteered open confessional to ridicule me shall come to naught! And that’s not Shakespeare by the way; it only seems!
So here we go. When you are a journalist and you hold down a position where you have responsibility to produce a newspaper or produce a news bulletin (broadcast or online), the way you read or follow other news sources (the wire services, online, newspaper or follow radio and television news broadcast) is always different from the way some other un-involved parties would. So reading a newspaper, for instance, is often like a tooth combing activities. You see, the truth is that you don’t want to miss anything; because you don’t want to be beaten to anything – one reason, actually, why you have to be extra-ordinarily curious. Now, you can see why this is not child’s play. And you can’t fake it either! More like saying to your face – “No faking it.”
During the week, as I read my newspapers in a tooth combing manner – which often involves reading news and advertising content – I came across something that jolted me. It was a quarter page advertising with a screaming title: Attention! Attention!! Attention!!! Upon seeing that call to order, my memories went back to the little time I spent as a Cub-Scout while in primary school; and immediately, all my senses went into attention mode. But that mode would soon easily be disrupted by my curious eyes, which went further to find the following line: NOTICE OF MASS BURIAL. By this time I went into a Waffi mode and shouted, “sho, mass burial for Naija?” This is where it gets a bit worrying.
A naval medical centre in Lagos State was announcing that it was going to embark on mass burial of abandoned corpses in its mortuary if depositors (you’ll think this was a bank, sort of) did not come to claim them. It was sad to come across this kind of information in a national newspaper. But even sadder still is the fact that some of the corpses now being threatened with mass burial had been abandoned since 2005 – all of nine years! If you were conscious about your mortality you would be concerned about how anyone could deliberately abandon the corpses of their loved ones for that long. Are these among the numerous unidentified dead of the Nigerian population – forgotten in different parts of the country? Are these corpses of people who had been missing for years and for which their families had found no closures?
As an inquisitive journalist, I have been asking all sorts of questions – who were these people and what did they do during their life time on this earth? What lives did they lead? Were they young or old before they died? Were some of them also abandoned when they lived and still are abandoned in death? This is the kind of stuff of which surrealism is made of! And if you are deep and are prone to consider things in their metaphysical realms, you would easily accept that this announcement made by this medical centre is weighty.
I know that it is possible that some of the corpses might have been from accidents or street urchins whose lives might have tragically come to an end, but I have spinning in my head the imagination that some could have been taken there by their families and deliberately abandoned either before or after they died! And that’s the crucially cruel bit of it. Family abandons family; friends abandon friends; employers abandon employees; employees abandon employers; leaders abandon followers; government abandons its people – sometimes 118 days after they disappear! What a wicked world this is!
PHILLIP ISAKPA