A new paradise inside Lagos lagoon

Seek first the paradise of the lagoon of Lagos, and every other thing – peace, debt settlement, accommodation, money, good health, happiness etc. shall be added to you forever.

That is the new creed in Lagos and many have discovered it. That is the benefit of being a Lagosian or living in Lagos. You have so many options to ending your life. Those that don’t choke in the poisonous fume of death-belching trucks in the traffic, by all rickety buses and death vending trucks get crushed by falling container carriers that have got the endorsement of the Road Safety Corps and the Vehicle Inspection Office to kill.

While these two infamous bodies hound and haunt you on the roads over seat belt or tyres that are about to expire because they love your life and want it preserved, they mandate their compatriots that operate the trucks and buses to crush you and choke life out of you.

If you don’t die of frustration in the Lagos traffic where the two agencies and LASTMA have resigned to the stranglehold of the outlaw vehicle operators, they make sure you don’t get out of a logjam on the First Rainbow-Mile 2 axis of the Oshodi-Apapa expressway.

But if these hazards on the streets are not enough to kill the Lagosian, the nagging of the power generator in her neighbourhood does it, by either driving you mad or destroying your system with the fumes of the same generators, or by heat when you would not afford the cost of fuel for the noise generating machine.

Well, having tried these options and more and found they have the same factor of delay or death in installments of the Lagosian, some have started acting smart to resolve the logjam – just plunge into the lagoon. As you do so, all instantly become well and resolved.

That way the end hastens and meets you in a jiffy, and in addition, you become a terminal celebrity. A certain medical doctor existed in this suicide-inducing city for years and nobody knew about him until the day he devised the fast option to explore the paradise in the lagoon. It’s as fast as it’s effective. He activated his PLUNGE-IN-THE-LAGOON mobile App, and all was well, all was celebration, all was popularity in death.

I watched in amazement how even the Commissioner of  Police of Lagos, a very powerful man, even drove in a hurry to the Third Mainland Bridge, mobilized his men and even got some diving equipment and facilities for them to plunge into the water and fish out the doctor alive or dead. At last, All Was Not Well. The body was later washed up lifeless.

I haven’t stopped wondering how the police that never pick your distress call when you are faced with security danger, or come to your rescue even when their patrol team spots you being strangled, all went rushing to the lagoon to rescue a man that tried the fatal plunge.

I think with the efficacy the police have just discovered, their slogan should be … Police is Your Friend at the point of suicide.

Could you believe that the police have even snatched two intending suicidists from the plunge act? I really could not understand the kind of mobile app they use that makes them know when someone wants to plunge and to track him or her to the spot and stop the bid.

But still bad enough, the police goodness has been half-hearted, judging from the story one of them told that the police chief who interrogated her said suicide attempt is crime and she would be prosecuted. Why?

Yes, I know suicide is crime punishable only when one fails. The one that succeeds is not punished. So, if you plan to plunge into the lagoon to end it, tidy up the process and make no rooms for lapses, otherwise they prosecute you. I mean the same people that stopped you ending it. So, in another way, the Lagos police haven’t done well by planning to prosecute the unsuccessful plungers.

But another issue is that there must be a reason the lagoon suddenly became so attractive as suicide arena and option although it hasn’t proven so potent, but attention-creating. Instead of dying quietly by hanging or swallowing some dosage of hemlock, they create a theatre of the act and get the police so busy running riot to rescue someone and spend some money. Is it all for the fun of public attention or to punish the police for neglect and maltreatment suffered in the past in their hands?

Whenever I hear of suicide, my mind races back to the treatise on the social malady by good old Emile Durkheim, the 19th Century German philosopher, whose theory has been the most accurate on suicide as the act of two classes of people – those totally detached or excessively attached to the society. And I think that is where we are now in the lagoon episodes. That is exactly the change the country voted for two years ago.

Before this change, the business of corruption was a public liability affair that was totally deregulated and many participated and traded or benefitted from the windfall of those that traded. But today, it’s closed-circuit affair and strictly privatized and those that don’t belong to the cabal die in hunger, whereas the operators speculate in dollars and roll in billions of naira everyday without leaving their room. It’s just a matter of phone call.

That change has brought more hardship, so choking, so asphyxiating and burdensome. Those majority citizens that can cope keep bidding time for the day it happens, or they get liberated. They are stuck in the change they clamoured for.

But for me, oh my! I am not contemplating a plunge. Never! For your information, I have survived their past threats and I dey kampe. I was born during the Biafra War. Their starve-them-dead policy never killed then. It only stopped me growing tall. Now, they have brought another form of war, the same actors after the Owerri-Mbaise genocide of Operation Leave Nothing Standing supervised and prosecuted by those of them still alive, they won’t get me. They won’t get my people either. God strong pass dem!

When you are in power and a people hitherto known for loving life and cowing from hurt start developing this raw courage of taking their lives as fashion, what never happened before, please listen to your conscience and know if all is well. Ask yourself if what the people get is what they bargained for.

The new slogan breaks the heart when the people who love their lives and family have made light of the enormity of death to take their lives everyday, or at least try.

Why should Lagosians devise the new trend of thinking there is a kingdom of the seas in the lagoon where all their problems and burdens would be gone? It is only hardship in the land that would create that possibility.

There is a preacher I love his messages. His name is Pastor Tunde Bakare. He said some years ago that: “Whenever you see a short man casting long shadows, know that the time is far spent and night is near.”

When a government in power sees the citizens take pride in suicide as a rave, use your tongue to number your teeth. ALL IS NOT WELL. That is exactly what a man called ALLWELL taught us by plunging into the lagoon and thereby emboldening others weighed down like him to toe his example. ALL is definitely NOT WELL.

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