By Tribune Editorial Board
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SOMETIMES, a society may need to look after its citizens in more intentional and special ways, especially where hardships arising from socioeconomic challenges have combined with the individual, personal and peculiar problems to exacerbate the proclivity for taking precipitate actions to survive or, worse still, to permanently escape from adversarial conditions. This is where counseling, monitoring and guided involvement in the management of the affairs of depressed citizens comes in handy.
The threshold of tolerance for the endurance of personal disappointments and failures has reduced drastically and not a few citizens would appear to be buckling under pressure. They cannot handle hopelessness and inability to fulfill personal goals, family and societal expectations. Recently, a student of the Yola Campus of Nigeria Law School, Ayomiposi Ojajuni, allegedly committed suicide because he was prevented from taking his final bar examination. He was said to have taken a poisonous substance which caused his death when he became aware that he had been banned from writing the examination. The authorities of the law school have yet to officially disclose the reason for preventing him from writing the examination but some media reports claimed that he was issued many queries by the authorities which he allegedly failed to answer, and that it was this that prompted the authorities to sanction him.
Meanwhile, there is a conflict between the account of the incident presented by the police, which they ostensibly obtained from the school authorities, and the narrative by the family of the deceased. Ayomiposi’s family released a statement accusing the school authorities of a cover up. According to the family, Ayomiposi had a misunderstanding with the school’s porter and had apologised but the authorities, nonetheless, set up a panel to investigate the matter. They claimed that the outcome and decision of the investigative panel was neither communicated to Ayomiposi nor his mother whose telephone number is said to be in possession of the school authorities. The same number was reportedly used to break the tragic news of her son’s death to her. Ayomiposi was said to be unaware of his fate until the morning of the examination, a situation which the family believed seriously affected his mental state. On the other hand, the police claimed that the deceased left the exam hall and returned to the campus in a tricycle, then scaled the school’s fence before injesting the poison that killed him.
Despite the conflicting narratives, it is evident that the inability to meet personal goal as well as family and societal expectations weighed the deceased down, causing him to slip into depression, which ultimately pushed him to take the terrible decision that suicide was the solution in the circumstance. It is really distressing and unfortunate. While it is true that life can sometimes throw up extremely difficult situations, suicide, a patently precipitate and irresponsible action, cannot possibly be a reasonable recourse or solution to any problem. Indeed, while suicide may be a sure-fire way to permanently run away from challenges or dodge responsibility, it is a mark of cowardice for anyone to willfully take his/her own life under any guise. There is always another day to fight. If you lose out, fight again. But the truth is that it is someone who is alive that can aspire or struggle to rise again after falling. The one who killed himself/herself has fallen permanently.
Pray, how overwhelming could challenges have been to cause a sane person to wilfully kill himself/herself? Where is the place of hope, the most important asset of every reasonable human? It is axiomatic that whoever chooses to kill himself/herself is totally bereft of hope and salutary expectations. This is a dangerous and trending disposition, especially amongst the youths, and it must be reined in through counseling and reorientation. Why didn’t the authorities pay particular attention to a student that seemed to be an outlier? What, for instance, stopped the school authorities from meeting physically with a student who allegedly ignored multiple queries issued to him? What if his physical or mental health condition was the reason he failed to respond to any of the queries? For a law student not to respond to several queries from the school authorities is most unusual, and it is of doubtful propriety to have assumed that the student was either being stubborn or lackadaisical. This is especially considering the fact that the deceased lost his father earlier in the year during externship.
Perhaps a bit of empathy could have helped in a tremendous way to enable the school authorities to truly stand in loco parentis to their student, as envisaged and designed by the system. We urge the authorities to learn from this incident and tweak their procedures to accommodate every student, not withstanding his/her tolerable shortcomings. Being too rigid does not help sometimes. After all, the law is made for man, not the other way round. It would not be out of place to consider cases on compassionate grounds, depending on the circumstances surrounding such cases. Now that Ayomiposi has killed himself, he is no longer available to correct those human errors and frailties that affected his conduct. And as it stands, he has been lost to his family and the society at large, and all the resources expended on him to become a productive human capital from the elementary to law school have gone down the drain. This is a colossal waste that could have been prevented.
From the legal, moral and religious viewpoints, suicide is construed as highly asocial and therefore loathsome. The illegality of suicide is succinctly brought to the fore by the fact that the state/law often steps in to punish the victims of failed suicide attempt. Also, in religious and moral terms, no one has a right to take his/her own life. And a breach of this code not only attracts subtle hatred to the family of the victim, but also oftentimes elicits trepidation in dealing with them. For instance, in many African cultures, the family of an eligible bachelor will be reluctant to allow their ward to marry a bride from a family with proven cases of suicide in the past, and vice versa. Yet, people hardly commit suicide because they hate themselves. It is the defeatist attitude that they may never recover from failure, sickness, disappointment, debt burden and so on, all of which are temporary challenges, that often pushes many to take their own lives. It is therefore imperative that citizens with this tendency are helped. And one of the best ways to help is to always be our brother’s keeper.
We urge the police to launch a painstaking inquiry into the incident. We also urge those who may be in adversarial conditions not to take their own lives.
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