It was late afternoon on Sunday that news of Dr. Allwell Orji’s suicide on 3rd Mainland bridge broke. This sad event has shocked many Nigerians even as we pray that God grants his family the gratitude to bear this great loss.

Sad as it is, this story got sadder for me on Tuesday when we got news that while a body had been recovered from the Lagos lagoon it was not the doctors, his body was then recovered yesterday. This leads to several questions including:

1. What is the identity of the person whose corpse was initially discovered?

2. What or who killed them?

3. For how long had the person been missing?

4. Have their family and friends been looking for them?

If these questions are mostly unanswered, what is the government especially the police doing to answer them?

It is true that Lagos State Commissioner of Police, Fatai Owoseni has spoken about the first body found saying at a press briefing according to ThisDay:

“The human error wednesday (referring to the body found) occured because as at the time the body was found under the bridge at Onikan, what went into the minds of the police officers from the Marine Police, was that he was the one since there was no reported case of any other person jumping into the lagoon.

“The police concluded that the found body was that of Orji until the driver came and said it was not Orji. The body and the clothes have been discoloured by water.”

Speaking further he promised: “We also want to do the sketching of the recovered body and show it to the public so that any person who knows him should come and identify the body.”

For now, there seems to be a macabre acceptance of finding a corpse without bothering to investigate how it came about up to the point that we only care about the family coming to claim their dead relative. We seem to have become desensitized to such occurrences and just shrug them off. However, such issues require thorough investigation by the police and related agencies and we as a society have to do more to value life and demand that no life is taken for granted or counted as unimportant.

We need to be more accountable and ensure that prepatrators of violent crime are apprehended and prosecuted according to the law while we also put systems in place to nanage depression that often leads to suicide.

Let Dr. Orji’s sad death be the turning point in the way we treat ourselves and the importance we place on life.

Source: http://www.opinions.ng/one-suicide-2-bodies-questions-arising-dr-orjis-suicide/

Suicide is never the solution