When Citizens take to suicide

BY KENNETH JUDE

At what point does a man decide to end it  all? Is it when he can no longer afford three-square meal a day or when he is faced with the stark reality that he can no longer cater for his family? Is it the inability to pay rent, buy cloth, wolf down green bottles or smoke weed? The foregoing questions has agitated my mind for weeks now going by the increasing number of those who have chosen to take their lives.  A single day hardly passes without one odd tale being added into our already sad and heartrending narrative of the country.
   

In the not too distant past, a common greeting of “how you dey?’’ elicited a simple and harmless answer of “I’m fine.’’ Today, it has changed. Now, ask an average Nigerian “how you dey?’’ the response you’ll get, at best is “I just dey.’’ Another lingo that now dominate the mere exchange of pleasantries and niceties are “guy, my brother/sister, hunger dey, pocket dry.’’  The reasons for this seeming loss of mere courtesy and sense of humour are not found on Mount Everest. Not a few persons will tell whoever cares to listen that it is what “change’’ has caused.
  

This is the sad but blood guzzling pass we have sunk into as a nation. Even before our British trained Minister of Finance, Mrs. Kemi Adeosun told a confounded nation that Nigeria is officially in recession, we were long swimming in the cesspool of recession and depression with our usual famed but fast fading air of unparalleled equanimity. What the federal government did was, at best, stating the obvious after weeks and months of euphemising the reality that has befallen us. From technical recession, technical this and technical that, we have now been told what we all knew long before the federal government condescended.
  

Nigerians have slowly but steadily transmogrified from the most happiest people on earth to the most saddest, depressed, if not hopeless and hapless people on earth. How will they not be when politicians and our privileged elites abandon a sinking nation to rather pursue their selfish ends? Rather than seek for ways to revamp a bleeding economy, all they do is blame and pass the buck. Now, they don’t care how we all survive the times. No, it bothers them not because they don’t feel our pains. Having built mansions, empires and stockpiled wealth they don’t even need, why should they wail with the common citizens who are perpetually at the receiving end of governments wrong choices, malfeasance and indiscretions?
 

To capture the mood of the nation better, a man in his early 30s reportedly took his life in Mbiabong Itam in Itu Local Government Area of Akwa Ibom State the other day. Popularly known as Jolly Boy, he is said to have dropped a suicide note where he blamed bad economy as reason for his action. Those who mustered courage to comment on the shocking incident said the late Jolly boy lived his name. He was jovial and outgoing, they said. According to them, he was into ogogoro (local gin), Cigarettes, stimulants’ business. In the note he left behind, he whined that his meagre income could no longer take care of his family hence his decision to end it all.
   

Jolly boy is not alone; a boy, 16 also committed suicide along Abak Road recently. He is said to have invested his father’s N12, 000 in the now proliferated bet and win business popularly known as “white paper.’’ His hope of recouping his money in multiples was dashed as he lost the game, his father’s money. Unable to bear his fate, he used his mother’s wrapper as rope, hung himself in the ceiling and dangled to death.
   

Another sad tale is that of a woman who gave birth to triplets. After putting to bed what could have ordinarily been her moment of joy, it turned out to be a moment of lamentation, tears and heartache. Unable to stand the “shock,’’ her husband bolted into thin air abandoning his wife and triplets to their fate. Compounding it all, the wife, stricken by financial hardship and faced with the reality that her husband who she could have looked up to help raise the children had disappeared, decided to take her life. She hailed from Ika local government area of Akwa Ibom State. Now, what becomes of the innocent offspring they jointly brought into the world?
   

The foregoing tales are what the bad and crumbled economy of Nigeria is causing its citizens who can no longer stand the shame, lack and squalor that confronts them on a daily basis. While taking their lives and the errant husband who ran away is not the way out of their (our) plight, a time comes in life when one can no longer bear the deadly and debilitating pangs and harshness life throws up each day. It is worse when prognosis has it that rice; a staple food consumed by over 90 percent of Nigerians may sale for N40, 000 in December. We have also been told that this recession may last for the next six months. When prognostications like this come from those we look up to to salvage our teary situation, only a few steely willed Nigerians can stand it. Little wonder many are now taking their lives as their own way of escaping the hardship that has befallen a nation where a privileged but utterly insignificant few are daily messing up our common wealth with their kleptomaniac and mindless avaricious tendencies.
   

At a newsstand the other day, two young men, obviously in their late twenties who, apparently came to glance at the dailies drew bystanders’ attention when they shouted themselves hoarse on seeing a headline that linked our former First Lady, Mrs. Patience Jonathan with N13.31 billion. That they were marvelled is an understatement. With folded arms, they looked on with mouth agape, unable to comprehend how one person could stock such a voluminous sum, large enough to feed the whole nation all in her account.  One of them asserted: “even if she uses N 100, 000 daily, she will not exhaust the money until she bids farewell to the world.  But Mama Patience is not the only Nigerian in this culture of benumbing sleaze. It is the pastime of those who we line in the streets in rain and shine to vote every four years.
    

When he saw another headline that blamed the country’s woes on the PDP, he flew into rage, arguing that Nigeria’s problem is not PDP, APC but an aggregation of the ill choices of our politicians both past and present that has sunk us into this state of forlornness and despondency. He was vociferous and unbending in his stance. He argued further that those blaming the PDP today were all members of the APC in the recent past hence wondered why they all will now transform into saints to qualify to cast stones at perceived sinners. Asides his displeasure with politicians, he also took a dig at today’s ministers of the gospel. To him, our men in cassock and fine suits are part and parcel of the malaise bedevilling Nigeria today. He said that pastors should do more than lionize, glorify and garland politicians with titles but preach the truth at all times irrespective of whose ox is gored. He wondered how that will be possible when huge sums exchange hands. I wondered too.
    

When I left them both, I mused on all what they said and pictured again, the expression on their faces; I concluded that we are indeed in a situation that requires urgent surgery. From their countenance and the amp of their voices as they fulminated on the state of the nation, you could see two gentlemen who have become abrasively distraught with their country. They are not alone in this state of hopelessness for a nation that held so much promise at independence. Alas, men and women that bestrode (and are still bestriding) our corridors of power have all contributed to our present woes, doom and gloom. All they now do is fill our ears with canticles of this political party and that political party being the cause of our collective inertia.
 

But in times like this, buck passing will do us no good. Nigerians are suffering; hungry and angry hence Men and women of goodwill must rise and save this contraption from implosion and final plunge into the precipice. God help us!