Filth, stench, bribery and corruption at Nigerian mortuaries and cemeteries
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.
“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 elderly. 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 strangerjournalist with unexpected ease and freedom.
Lifeless men reduced to stench and maggots
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. “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!
Accident victims no better than armed robbers
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, postaccident) was re-failing them in their death. There, in that horribly smelling passage, lay 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. Hard life in Nigeria Nigeria is currently 77th in the US News and World Report’s rankings of the best countries to live in. With a total of 80 countries ranked — 20 more than the 60 ranked in 2016 — Nigeria is the fourth worst country to live in of the lot, faring only better than Algeria, Iran and Serbia. It is not difficult to see why Nigeria had such dismal placing; it ranked very poorly in most of the judging indices: human rights value, gender equality, religious freedom, respect for property rights, trustworthiness and distribution of political power, access to business capital, skill of labour force, technological expertise, transparency in business practices, infrastructure, manufacturing costs, tax environment, transparent government practices, job market, public education and health systems.
Corpses dumped in a room — just like a dunghill
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 bonk 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: “Oyaegbon, eyiti e wo yen to. To bateyinlorun, e lo gbe wan wa,” meaning “Bros, what you’ve seen is enough. If you’re not 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 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 Dr. 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. Stripping the dead naked On our way out, we bypass a fresh, fullycovered (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 surprisingly attendant 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.”
Kickbacks: Mortuary corruption at UCH
We exit the morgue and it’s time to discuss the costs. It’s also time to discover why the attendant had been overzealous, ripping open the covering of corpses and sneaking in an unknown potential customer through the backdoor.
Depositing a corpse at the UCH morgue costs N1200/day throughout the first week, N1,800/day in the second week, N3,600/day from the third week onwards, and a one-off N18,000 payment at the point of collection. These are the confirmed official rates. The attendant, though, has an interesting bargaining proposition.
“There is a way we can assist you,” he says. “But I cannot do it alone; I must get the go-ahead of my boss. We will calculate the number of days your corpse will spend here, then we will find a way of reducing it for you.”
Does this then mean the corpse’s family will just give the attendant and his boss a token in appreciation, as led by the spirit?
“No,” he cuts in sharply. “There will be an agreement, but it is not something we can say in public. Just be sure that we will do it in such a way that you will not be hurt, and we too will not be hurt.”
The last line is a statement reminiscent of corruption at the Apapa port, when an official of the Nigeria Customs Service told the journalist in December 2015: “See that man? He is the deputy comptroller-general in charge of cars here in Lagos.
“So, if you’re bringing in cars and you are to pay N20, you may decide to pay me N15. I will then go to him to say, ‘Oga, this man here has paid me N15, how will we help him clear his goods so that he can survive, you can survive and I can also survive; because all of us must survive.”
The morgue attendant suddenly gets jittery — suspicious, in fact.
“I don’t even know who you are; maybe you’re a policeman, I don’t know,” he says with a giggle, almost throwing the journalist off balance. This he follows up with a Yoruba adage roughly translated to mean: “Rather than watch the child of a Samaritan sink into a canal, the man of light will continue the work of light.”
“We once helped someone like that, and he went upstairs to report,” he adds.“It became a matter of query and panel; one of us was sacked as a result — just because of N1,000.”
The attendant claims to be helping people, but he is indeed helping his own pocket. Eager to get this deal tidied and move to the next, he says quickly: “Take my number; call me when you’re ready.”
UCH PRO goofs, says ‘we don’t take corpses from outside’
When the findings at the morgue were brought to his notice during a telephone conversation, Mr. Deji Bobade, the Public Relations Officer of UCH gave a twosentence reply before abruptly ending the call even though he was only the recipient, not the caller.
When told that mortuary attendants were demanding cuts from people wanting to deposit corpses at the UCH morgue, he said: “What money? We don’t take corpses from outside.”
What he didn’t know was that an attendant at the same morgue had expressed readiness to accept a corpse that supposedly died in Bodija, and was even planning to involve his “boss”. At Ikorodu General Hospital, the care for corpses is dependent on bribes The body-preserving facilities at the morgue of Ikorodu General Hospital must rank as highly as is obtainable in any part of the country, but the managers of the place are unmistakably cold-blooded. Confronted by the mournful sight of a man who had presumably just lost his uncle that Sunday morning, the morgue attendant is in no mood to offer words of consolation. A stern, tough-looking man, his words are piercing and his eye contacts scorching. He is the type of man no one should bump into in the early moments of bereavement. He takes forever after the doorbell was pressed before showing up, refuses to let his ‘bereaved’ visitor in to at least have an idea of the state of the morgue, declines to discuss the official corpse deposition fees, and does little to hide his irritation with the visitor’s enquiries.
“Bring your corpse first, we will explain everything to you then,” he snaps at some point, attempting to bring the conversation to an abrupt end. “Even a private hospital can’t beat what we have here.”
But when reminded that it is important to have an idea of the expense so that the relatives of the corpse would not default, he suddenly finds his voice.
“When coming, bring something along for those who will help you take care of the corpse,” he says very coldly as he settles his bum on the three-stair pavement outside the morgue.
Is this “something” a part of the official fees?
“No,” he replies. “Whether you pay the official fees or you don’t, you will need to take care of those who will take care of your corpse.”
How much, then, is this unofficial payment? “It depends on how you want it,” he says, getting up and walking towards the door in a clear display of irritation. “The amount of money you will give to those taking care of the corpse will depend on how dear the deceased is to you.”
The ‘bereaved’ makes it clear he will try “one or two other mortuaries” unless he is allowed to see the state of this particular morgue. At this point, the attendant softens. He reluctantly opens the door of the morgue, allowing the visitor to peep in. “This is just the first room,” he says. “Can you see?”
Within five seconds, he slams the door. End of discussion. Extorting the bereaved Extortion of the bereaved at Ikorodu General Hospital is a long-running practice. So says Susaine Olabiyi (not real names) who lost her mother in 2012 and was stunned by the number of unofficial payments she was asked to make.
“There is a lot of extortion that goes with losing a loved one in Nigeria. You get to the morgue, you pay the normal fees. The people attending to you want you to pay extra; at every point you get to, someone is literally waiting to extort you,” she says.
In Dubai, where her sister died in 2015, the experience was different.
“We paid just the regular fees but here in Nigeria, they tell you, if you want something to be treated well or quick, you have to give something; if you want this, you have to give somebody that. It’s all about extortion, not about helping out anyone who is in grief.
“Of course, there is a business in burying people; it is legitimate and people will always die. But, you see, even just to dig the grave, there are people who collect this and that, even after paying the regular fees. All these don’t help the person that is grieving; it’s like heaping more burden on the bereaved.”
Beyond extortion, Olabiyi has been on the wrong end of grief-worsening handling of corpses.
“When my sister died in Dubai, there was some succour in seeing that even in death she was treated specially,” she says.
“You needed to see that way the wounds on her dead body were treated and padded. I’m talking about someone who was already dead. The way they went ahead to do everything gave me some succour. And we were not even citizens. Compare to Nigeria, your own country, where everything was shoddy.
“My sister died on the 14th day of September and we brought her into the country on the 21st, meaning she spent seven days at a Dubai morgue. She stayed at the LASUTH morgue for just two days and by the time we were burying her, her colour had changed. She had turned black. Chemicals!”