The reported suicide of a student a while ago, who was studying English at the University of Nigeria, who quipped to his friend, “do you know I will die today,” which turned out not to be a joke, as it had reportedly been in the past, tended to open a floodgate of such dastardly incidents. The story shocked me to the roots, given that I also passed that route in my educational pursuit. I shuddered to imagine Kalu Uka, Ossie Enekwe, Emmanuel Obiechina, Chinua Achebe, Juliet Okonkwo, Emeka Nwabueze and a host of other intellectual giants in that department in my days, many of whom had gone to the great beyond, would stand in the classroom to discuss a student who had drunk the death-laden Sniper, and left a rather satanic note asking “Where do atheists go when they die?”
When we lost the vivacious student, Nneka Duru-Rajis, in my days, to a motorcycle accident in Lagos while on holiday, we were traumatised. We visited her village in Orlu, Imo State, and wept our eyes sore. Nothing could have been stranger than any such scary story among us. We looked forward to a great future. It was unthinkable that any of us would be reported to have killed his or herself. That incident at Nsukka opened the floodgate of several other reports of suicide, such that even jilted lovers took their lives as though they would meet another lover in the great beyond.
Suicide is said to be a psychological matter, bordering on the psyche of those who engage in it. This intervention is stirred by a radio report about a lady, in Apete area of Ibadan, who committed suicide and the note indicated that she took her life by hanging from a ceiling fan in her room because a friend she had guaranteed a loan for in a micro-finance bank had eloped with the money, leaving her to face the music from the bank. It was heart-rending that the friend put her in that financial mess and bolted. I hope the friend has heard about her guarantor’s demise, and why she took her life.
There are bound to be such disappointments and discontents but they are not worth a human life. They pale into insignificance compared to what such disconsolate lives could become with time. It was said that the greak Zik of Africa suffered suicidal depressions but pulled himself up and the rest, as they say, is history. There is sense in the saying that those who take their lives are cowards who have no guts to face the future. Those who have been restrained from the action know that it was a fatal one, which held the grievous consequence of terminating a wonderful future that was threatened with truncation on account of temporary setback.
The woman in Ibadan makes me tend to be overwhelmed by emotions, given that her move to help a friend put her in a tight corner. She stood for the friend, who the report did not identify, to take a loan. The friend who, perhaps, could not pay back, chose to take the cowardly route of escaping rather than face the issues. I do not know the conditions for the loan but no loan condition would ever include loss of life. If your debtor dies, as an adage goes, your debt dies too. So the debt could have been rescheduled or even written off. But the coward debtor ran away, leaving the friend with the equally weak option of committing suicide. Both persons acted like weaklings, but the greater blame should go to the person who took a lone and ran away. We know that he who fights and runs away lives to fight another day. It does not apply here. The original debtor did not fight, he or she simply ran away. Now there is blood in his or her hands.
I implore the orientation agencies, at state and federal levels, to mount fresh and sustained campaigns against suicide. It has been said that Nigeria has overtaken Italy in drug deals, just as suicide reports have been on the increase. Economic hardship has been blamed as the major culprit in increasing suicide, as directly linked to this case study. The lady who hanged herself in response to being jilted by her lover cannot come under the aegis of economic hardship nor would the student whose parents picked his bills. Even in the presumptuous admission that the cases above have economic linkages, which they do not have, is it as weighty as to elicit suicide?
The tendency for people to take their lives at the slightest provocation stems from an internal disorder. The church and other religious organisations owe it a duty to ensure they tell their people that not only is suicide an act against God, because most religions despise killing, it is an act of cowardice. People have a tendency to locate their problems outside themselves, but a thorough introspection may locate the problems within the precincts of self. Instead of wanting to end it all, think about starting again.
The woman who took her life over vicarious loan default paid for an offence she did not commit. Her ego may also have egged her to that cowardly end. I do not know if her image is better with a suicide hanging on it. Her family members may become vicarious victims of her action. I know a girl who lost a suitor when the fact was laid bare that her father killed himself. I understand the suitor concluded, erroneously, in my view, that there could be a genetic streak to such tendencies. An innocent daughter had paid for the sins of her father. The truth being that suicide has consequences beyond the offender. However, I express rather worthless sympathies to the woman who might have killed herself in ignorance.