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.
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!
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.
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.
As if admitting that no sane human would want his deceased loved one in such debilitating environment as the Adeoyo morgue, the attendant says while offering his phone number: “You may not like this place; in that case, there is the alternative of a private morgue. Call me and I’ll come with an ambulance to meet you at your wherever you are.”
BREACHING THE RULES AT UCH MORGUE
One of the mortuary attendants at the University College Hospital (UCH), Nigeria’s oldest teaching hospital, is unsure if he should let in the journalist posing as a potential client. By his explanation, no one enters the UCH morgue unless he/she is in possession of a death certificate — the clear evidence of intention to deposit a corpse at the facility. But this fellow is so lost in his inordinate lust for quick, unearned money that he breaches the laid-down rules.
“You want to bring the corpse today. How long is it likely to stay here?” he asks, apparently calculating the cost to decide if the length of stay will guarantee him the chance to make some cut.
“Two months,” he is told. “But we haven’t decided; we won’t until we’ve seen the place.”
“You cannot enter,” he insists. “Even if you have a corpse here, unless you present a death certificate, you won’t be allowed to enter.”
Seeing that the potential customer was prepared to walk away, the attendant looks left, then right to be sure no one is watching, and — after a split-second hesitation — whispers: “Come in.”
Both men walk through the backdoor to the morgue, where the attendant conducts the journalist on a tour of the facility, opening cabinet after cabinet and explaining how the system works.
The UCH mortuary is by far better than the human dump house that Adeoyo Hospital most charitably calls a morgue. But that’s exactly how it should be: in 1951, after the establishment of a Faculty of Medicine at the University of Ibadan, Adeoyo was proposed as the teaching hospital. But the visitation panel, led by T.F. Hunt of the University of London, rejected the enhanced facilities provided by the government. Two years later, the physical development of UCH began at its permanent site.
From scratch, UCH was meant to be superior to Adeoyo so it is no surprise to find its morgue nearly spick and span. There is some slightly offensive odour but that is to be expected — a morgue isn’t a restaurant, after all. The room is ice cold and the corpse cabinets are so spotless a novice would mistake them for refrigerators.
The attendant opens the first cabinet; it’s a 76-year-old male corpse brought in on April 17 but this is May already and the body is intact — ice cold. True to his words, the corpse is in near-perfect condition.
On our way out, we bypass a fresh, fully-covered (save her face) corpse waiting to be moved out of the morgue, and a bulge around the abdomen is easily noticeable. I ask what is responsible for the bulge. Rather than just answer verbally, the attendant surprisingly flips open both ends of the cover cloth to reveal the woman’s nakedness — an action that would have enraged her family had they witnessed it.
“That is its hands,” he replies, ascribing the status of an inanimate object to the woman. “Its hands are tied together but we will loosen them if we need to embalm the body.”
To be continued
Source: International Centre For Investigative Reporting
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