₦airaland Forum

UNDERCOVER INVESTIGATION: Filth, stench, bribery, corruption at Nigerian mortuaries and cemeteries

For two weeks, investigative journalist ‘FISAYO SOYOMBO ‘travelled to the land of the dead’, spending extensive time at 12 government-owned mortuaries and cemeteries in Lagos, Ogun and Oyo states. His findings at the mortuaries include bribery and corruption among morgue attendants, indiscriminate stacking of corpses, decomposition of corpses, and unhealthy and substandard preservation of corpses. At the cemeteries, he discovered that remains are prone to exhumation soon after burial — although the super-rich, who can afford the multimillion naira cost of private cemeteries, are safe. For the poor, Nigeria is not one of the best countries to live in, yet it is also one of the worst places to die in, Soyombo writes.

“Can you touch it? Try. Touch it.”

“No, I can’t touch a corpse, sir.”

“Why?” the mortuary attendant, a middle-aged man — dark, bony and canny in his ways — asks the journalist, a young man who is supposedly morgue-hunting for a freshly-dead uncle.

“Omode ni mi. Eyin agba ni e ma n so pe ko si bi omode se le ni aso to, ko le ni akisa to awon agba (I am only but a young man. It is you, the elders, who say that regardless of the number of clothes a young man possesses, he can’t have as many rags as the elders.). Not to say I am worthy of speaking in idioms in the presence of an elder.”

“God bless you,” he replies. “May you grow old!”

The man loosens up, and from that moment converses with the stranger-journalist with unexpected ease and freedom.

LIFELESS MEN REDUCED TO STENCH AND MAGGOTS

Although he loosens up, the air inside the morgue of the Oyo State-owned Adeoyo Maternity Teaching Hospital, Yemetu, Ibadan, toughens up. The stench in the outer room thickens and all three men in the room wonder if it is emanating from the three fresh corpses in the outer room. Do we even call it an outer room? Not exactly. It’s just a passage, measuring no more than a few tens of metres in both length and breadth.

By that small entryway lie three corpses in three long, diagonally-positioned pans, two to the left and one to the right. The first, to the left, has a bullet wound in the head. A young man ostensibly in his thirties, he’s spotting a sky-blue pair of jeans with a white vest and brown short-sleeved shirt. His body is bloodied, and the origin can be traced to his head. Apparently, he died of gunshot wound in the head.

“They said he was an armed robber,” the man says of the lifeless fellow. “They said. That is what the police said.”

One close look at the dead young man, his neck is adorned by a Catholic rosary. A rosary-wearing robber? Riddle!

ACCIDENT VICTIMS NO BETTER THAN ARMED ROBBERS

A little further to the right is another bloodied man, older this time and taller too. Slightly bow-legged as well. Unlike the first, he is naked — save for a stack of clothing placed over his groin. It is hard to say, first time, how exactly he died. The splatter of blood is visible around the right side of his torso, but lower down, his right leg is badly burnt.

Further up again but back to the left is the third corpse, again naked save for a groin-covering piece of clothing. He bears similarities with the second body: the splash of blood and the blemish of fire.

“These people were involved in an accident,” the attendant says in a tone lacking in either pity or empathy. “They were involved in an accident late yesterday night, and they didn’t have access to immediate medical help.”

One final three-way glance at the corpses and it is hard to tell who is who. Ungraciously lumped in that small hallway with the “armed robber” are two people whose only ‘offence’ was to have been involved in a road crash. The two, like the third, are stinking and maggots are starting to appear around them. The system that failed them while they were alive (they didn’t get quick help, post-accident) was re-failing them in their death. There, in that horribly smelling passage laid their lifeless bodies in a most undignified manner. Life in Nigeria is hard enough, yet death itself, when it ends in a government health facility, is in its starkest and unkindest state.

HARD LIFE IN NIGERIA

Nigeria is currently 77th in the US News and World Report’s rankings of the best countries to live in. With a total of 80 countries ranked — 20 more than the 60 ranked in 2016 — Nigeria is the fourth worst country to live in of the lot, faring only better than Algeria, Iran and Serbia. It is not difficult to see why Nigeria had such dismal placing; it ranked very poorly in most of the judging indices: human rights value, gender equality, religious freedom, respect for property rights, trustworthiness and distribution of political power, access to business capital, skill of labour force, technological expertise, transparency in business practices, infrastructure, manufacturing costs, tax environment, transparent government practices, job market, public education and health systems.

Business, the basic building block of survival in any country, is extremely hard to start in Nigeria. In the 2017 Ease of Doing Business Index of the World Bank group, Nigeria ranked 169 of the 190 countries rated, bettering the placing of just 21, many of them war-torn. Even a number of African countries widely perceived as minnows — Lesotho, Botswana, Swaziland, Burundi, Sao Tome and Principe, Mozambique, Cape Verde and Comoros — fared markedly better than the self-acclaimed ‘Giant of Africa’.

For a nation experiencing its worst economic decline in 30 years dating back to 1987, life for the ordinary citizen is tougher than ever before. A January 2017 research by TheCable documents the complaints of both traders and buyers about the skyrocketing prices of food. Even staple foods — the likes of garri, rice and beans — had become unaffordable for the common man. As of December 2016, retailers bought a bag of garri for N6,000 but by January 12, 2017, it went for 10,000 — almost double the previous month’s price.

With the hardship in town, it would seem to suffering Nigerians that death (and suicide attempts have spiked in recent times) offers an eternal escape route. How wrong!

CORPSES DUMPED IN A ROOM — JUST LIKE A DUNGHILL

Inside the Adeoyo morgue, bodies are positioned on wooden and cemented platforms that look more makeshift than assured. On the cemented platform in the middle of the room are three corpses, the one in the middle so awkwardly placed face down, his spirit can surely not be resting. To the left of the entryway is a three-layer boarding-school-type ramshackle bunk on which a wooden plank supports a corpse. While the corpse on the uppermost layer is covered with a cloth, the three on the middle layer and the three on the lower are naked. And these are all corpses that had been in the morgue for minimum of a week. With his bare hand (no glove or any other protective covering), the attendant viciously slaps the most recently-deposited corpse — a tall, chubby 40-year-old man brought in exactly a week before — to prove the body had been well-embalmed.

To the right of the room is a slab on which three corpses are gracelessly set, two lying on their sides against the wall and the last lying face down. A fourth corpse is in a standing position against the slab.

“That one is their policeman,” says the morgue attendant. In fact, he is a soldier whom we told to watch over all the bodies here. If anyone attempts to try any nonsense, he’ll shoot the person. There’s a gun in front of him even though you may not see it.”

In the centre of the room lay a slab that can contain only two-thirds of even the smallest of bodies, yet it is there all the same, meaning the three corpses on it are just short of dangling.

A peep through a hole gives view to an adjoining room — smaller, darkish and stinking — hosting a heap of charred corpses stacked against one another just like refuse is dumped on a dunghill. It is as though these corpses matter less than the others. First impression is that their deposition at the morgue must have been unpaid for. An attempt to have a closer look is truncated by the attendant, who barks: “Oya egbon, eyi ti e wo yen to. To ba teyin lorun, e lo gbe wan wa,” meaning “Bros, what you’ve seen is enough. If you’re satisfied, go and bring your corpse.”

He would say, minutes later, that the corpses dumped in that room were part of the 26 people who lost their lives three days earlier in a grisly road accident along the Lagos-Ibadan Expressway. The accident was caused by the collision of two 18-seater buses. Notable among the few survivors was a baby thrown out of the bus by his father at the start of the fire that followed the collision.


READ MORE: https://www.icirnigeria.org/undercover-investigation-filth-stench-bribery-corruption-at-nigerian-mortuaries-and-cemeteries/

Oga Fisayo watin you dey find from prison to mortuaries and cementary anyway nice write up.

olasaad:
Oga Fisayo watin you dey find from prison to mortuaries and cementary

He's doing a wonderful and unique journalism. The dude is going underworld to further expose level of decadent in our country.

Kudos to the guy.

tooth4tooth:
He's doing a wonderful and unique journalism. The dude is going underworld to further expose level of decadent in our country.

Kudos to the guy.

Yeah I know at least someone is doing something different

I can Visit lagos

But I can't stay!