Nigeria Content Online

A calamitous
national occurence was casually under-reported as a human interest or
crime story by some newspapers last week. It should have been the stuff
of screaming headlines and angry, editorials Fifty year-old Shuaibu
Atanda is a father of six hired by the Lagos University Teaching
Hospital to evacuate the bodies of dead babies on a contractual basis.
He was arrested on July 3 in the outskirts of Lagos with five
Ghana-must-go bags containing the corpses of 76 dead babies he was
contracted to bury at Atan Cemetery. Here are the gruesome details from
the proverbial horse’s mouth:

“I am a private
contractor with LUTH and I have been helping the department of Morbid
Anatomy to clear unclaimed babies corpses for the past two years. The
corpses the police found with me are corpses for the months of March
and April – 40 corpses for March and 36 corpses for April. I was
supposed to bury the corpses at the Atan Cemetery at Yaba but I was
financially down because I have used almost all the money I requested
from the hospital to bribe the people working at the Morbid and Anatomy
Department.

“I also bribed
people at the account department. I gave one Mr Abraham Ekohmi, the
unit head of the Morbid Department, N50,000; I gave one Mr Everest,
40,000 and two staff of the accounts department 10,000 each, so that I
can continue with my job. The money I charged the hospital for my
service is N185,000 and it was Mr. Ekhomi that inflated it to that
amount. After settling all of them, I was left with nothing to bury the
corpses at the Atan Cemetery at Yaba, because they were demanding
N90,000 for each month from me before they will collect the corpses.
Since I did not have the N90,000, I decided to help myself by taking
the corpses to a bush at Agbowa to bury them. It was because I have to
bribe my way that was why I could not afford the cemetery fees.” It is
tragic that this story had zero shelf life in our newspapers.

Subscribers to the
various – and increasingly visible Nigerian Internet listservs such as
Naijapolitics, Talknigeria, NIDOA, and Nigerianworldforum – even tried,
as we say in Naija-speak. Because most of them are based in
Euro-America and are part of the social regimes of national shock and
outrage that would have greeted the idea of seventy-six dead babies
discovered in bags in Britain, Canada, or the USA, they screamed for
about two or three days before that thread was forgotten. However, some
of the commentators went the predictable way of a knee-jerk
condemnation of Mr. Shuaibu Atanda. As far as I know, only Mr.
Ibukunolu Alao Babajide, an Arusha-based lawyer and a prominent member
of the Nigerian Internet community, offered reassuring perspectives on
the broader national and systemic implications of the tragedy.

Mr. Shuaibu Atanda
is one of those honest and hard working Nigerians who should be on the
national honours list as opposed to the extant culture of crowding the
worthless list with scurrilous members of the political status quo
whose only qualification for national honours is the fact that they
have been able to steal a couple of billions from the Nigerian people.
Mr. Atanda belongs in the class of those little dispossessed people who
not only bear the brunt of the visionlessness of the morons in the
rulership in Abuja but who also have to clean up after them.

When you turn your
University teaching hospitals to baby death factories (LUTH even has to
hire private contractors to evacuate the tons of dead babies they
manufacture!); when whatever is left of structure has, in turn, been so
corroded by corruption that even the roadside contractor hired to do
the job is unable to afford regular cemetery fees, why arrest and
criminalise him for taking the initiative to bury the bodies somewhere
else in the oustskirts of Lagos? None of the reports – including police
accounts – has indicated so far that he was doing anything untoward
with the bodies at the time of arrest.

The dead babies,
LUTH, and Mr. Shuaibu Atanda are all victims of the criminals in our
rulership. They should be held squarely responsible for the bigger
picture. It is infuriating to note that the same criminals who cannot
provide health care of Burkina Faso standards to Nigerians are the ones
now planning to steal N6.5 billion in the name of their yeye
independence anniversary later this year.

Shock is dead in
Nigeria. If Nigerians at home have lost the capacity to be shocked, as
the fact that the idea of seventy-six dead babies in Ghana-must-go bags
only registered as an imperceptible blip in national discourse,
shouldn’t our obtuse rulers at least pretend that they still care?

What, in the name of God, are Ken Wiwa, Oronto Douglas, and Ima
Niboro doing in Aso Rock? These are gentlemen who ought to know how
these things are done. These are gentlemen who ought to be able to tell
Oga Jonathan that when 76 Nigerian babies are found in Ghana-must-go
bags, there must be a comforting statement from the presidency. As for
Dimeji Bankole and David Mark, well, they were partying in Lucky
Igbinedion’s mansion in South Africa. Seventy-six dead Nigerian babies
aren’t enough to make them interrupt their faaji and rush to Abuja to
call for special hearings! Na so we see am.