UNDERCOVER INVESTIGATION: Filth, stench, bribery, corruption at Nigerian mortuaries and cemeteries ( Part 3)

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.

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NO INSECTICIDE, AIR FRESHENER AT OGUN GENERAL HOSPITAL

This world is not my home

I’m just a-passing through

My treasures are laid up

Somewhere beyond the blue.

The angels beckon me

From heaven’s open door

And I can’t feel at home

In this world anymore.



It’s not just the opening two stanzas of Jim Reeves’ This World Is Not My Own, it’s the ring tone of the lead mortuary attendant at the State Hospital on Sokenu Road, Ijaye Abeokuta, owned and run by the Ogun State government. A calm, measured, simply-dressed man, he wears the aura of a man who understands, by virtue of his work, that life is vanity. He is one who takes his work seriously, too: he picks up the phone, studies the screen, and silences it. Moments later, the phone rings again. Again, the attendant retrieves it — a black Tecno product — from the window and silences it. It’s not time to talk. Instead, he opts to attend to a visitor seeking to know the costs of depositing a fresh corpse at the morgue.

“You’ll obtain a card for N500, and pay N20,000 for the first seven days. After the first seven days, it’s N500/day,” he says.

Asked if that is all, he adds: “No. You will buy a bottle of insecticide and another of air freshener.”

The conversation is interrupted by the caller; and as he answers this time, his colleague fishes out a Raid Insecticide and a Wind air as proof of the practice.

Asked to see where the corpse would be deposited, he doesn’t hide his shock. “You mean you want to see our office?” he queries, before beckoning his colleague to open the morgue.

OGUN GENERAL HOSPITAL IS IN A SHAMBLES
His colleague opens a room. In it are four dead bodies — two apiece for both sexes — all in pans placed on a slab. This is where fresh corpses are received, and they are there for five days. The first corpse, a woman’s, is naked, her trunk bearing some whitish substance that went unexplained. It is a heart-wrenching sight the woman’s family would surely not want to behold.

“This one was brought here just yesterday,” the second attendant says. “As you can see, the formalin is still active.”

For the records, this is the 10th year since the European Union banned the use of formaldehyde (an organic compound from which formalin is derived) as a biocide, including in embalming, due to its carcinogenic properties.



The main room where the corpses are then transferred to after five days does not itself offer any form of relief to the grieving. The walls are paling, the floor bear spots of stagnant water, the air is thick with stench and the room is generally mangy. Some corpses lie bare on planks — clear evidence that the traditional corpse pans were in limited supply.

THE MORTUARY ATTENDANT WHO HATES HIS ‘OFFICE’
At the Federal Medical Centre, Idi-Aba, Abeokuta, also in Ogun State, the mortuary attendant is averse to the idea of entering the morgue — same place his colleague at State Hospital, Ijaye, had proudly described as “our office”. Neither does he want the visitor to enter.

Instructed by his boss to open the morgue — after the visitor had hinted he would take his corpse elsewhere if he wasn’t allowed to have prior look at the morgue — he protested. “But you’re already in the mortuary,” he grumbled. “What else do you want to see?”

Reluctantly, he leads the visitor down a passage by the right, bypassing a few rooms before finally stopping by one on the far left. He unlocks the door and steps backwards, signaling the visitor to enter with a you-said-you-want-to-see-now-you’re-here look. Even he wants to go nowhere close.

The room is clean, frankly. The corpses are all dressed to the teeth, making it impossible to tell the males from the females. It appears, though, that there is an attempt to distinguish the old corpses from the fresh: the ones close to the door are robed in deep green while the ones further away are in light, leafy green. The bodies are all placed on planks, neatly so. As far as sight is concerned, there is nothing starkly offensive to behold.

Unlike other morgues, there is no stench to deal with — although the smell can’t entirely be said to be pleasant. But also unlike other morgues, there is a strange, fast-gathering peppering of the eyes. Without a smidgen of doubt, the room has been sprayed with a chemical so strong that it attacks the eyes. No human with naked eyes can survive five minutes inside that morgue without letting out involuntary tears. The journalist doesn’t last two minutes before he asks to leave. With the benefit of hindsight, this is the exact reason the attendant was hesitant to enter.

CLEANERS OF THE DEAD ARE FOOLING AROUND WITH DEATH

What must have happened in that room is that a derivative of formaldehyde — formalin the usual suspect — was generously applied to the air to retain the dryness of the corpses. As the corpses were not warehoused in a cold room, there was always the risk of decomposition. The generous use of formaldehyde was to counter this possibility, but it comes along with its own calamity.

Formaldehyde is not only toxic, it is volatile and poses significant danger to human health. In 2011, the US National Toxicology Program branded it a “human carcinogen”. In any case, that designation ought to have come four long years earlier, but for the fight- back of the manufacturing industry.

Also, a research published in the US in 2015 linked Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS), also called Lou Gehrig’s disease, with constant exposure of mortuary workers to the formaldehyde in embalming fluid. The research team estimated people’s on-the-job exposure to formaldehyde, using criteria developed by the US National Cancer Institute. They then used death records to track deaths caused by ALS. Their finding was that men with a high probability of formaldehyde exposure were about three times as likely to die of ALS as those who had never been exposed to the chemical.

As described by the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), ALS is a “progressive and ultimately fatal neurological disease that attacks the nerve cells responsible for controlling muscles”. It has no cure yet.

SANGO CEMETERY IS OVERCROWDED

“If you really value your dead one, don’t try to bury him at Sango Cemetery,” goes the warning from Babatunde Akanji, who has lived all his life in Ibadan and has heard many tales of the uprooting of corpses and double burial of corpses in single vaults.

“That cemetery is filled up but their people will never tell you. You’ll just go back after five or 10 years and your corpse would be gone, either because it has been uprooted or because another corpse has been interred directly on top of it.”

Therefore, the visit to the government-owned Sango Cemetery, located in Ibadan, capital of Oyo State, is to verify the claims of a space constraint — although it is hard not to notice the appallingly weedy graveyard and the stagnant, potentially-hazardous water in the gutters. The cemetery “marketer on duty” — a bald, elderly man with wobbly legs and a slim frame — vehemently denies that there is a lack of space.

“Do you have time?” he says when told that other cemeteries will be considered for the impending interment unless the available space here is seen. “Let’s go!”

The cemetery marketer, journalist and a third party exit the cemetery gate to the roadside and walk in the Sango-UI direction. After some 500metres on foot, Baba Onigi, as he would later introduce himself, slides left to enter the cemetery through an unfenced pathway. Bizarrely, a woman is selling pepper and vegetables less than 100metres away from the first noticeable tombstone. There’s an uncompleted building in that territory, in fact, and people are cohabiting in it. A refuse dump is also in the zone.

Baba Onigi points vaguely at a spot where land is supposedly available. But there is nothing visible other than some irregularly-positioned tombs, a stretch of land covered by overgrown weeds, plus unmarked heaps of sand — clear evidence that some digging had previously taken place. It becomes clear that there is truly no space, and any corpse buried there would either be uprooted someday or find itself in some unsolicited company.

To be continued

Source: International Centre For Investigative Reporting