Most of you must have read the story about a man who killed his wife, cut her body into pieces and buried the pieces in different locations around Lagos.
I was around the location when the story started unfolding. See, I went to the market on a Saturday afternoon and like every market it was rowdy but not as hot because of the harmattan that visited us the week before. I saw a crowd gathered somewhere down the market. First, I thought it was one of those people selling herbal drinks that grew hair overnight and cured cancer in three hours, but when I saw a police van, I knew something was smelling and it wasn’t the fish.
I asked a woman that was walking towards me from the scene what happened, she told me it was a woman that cut off her husband’s wife head and her step child’s head. What? There were no details and so I wasn’t even interested in going near the scene. Images stay in my head for too long. Another person coming out from the crowd said it was a man that killed his wife and cut off her head. I did not know which of the versions to believe, I had no desire to verify the story but the fact was that a human being’s head had been cut off.
Do you know how difficult it is to cut off the head of a chicken? I remember watching my mum kill our Christmas chicken and crying, not to talk of a full human being made in the image and likeness of God. I surfed the pages of The PUNCH the next week until I found the real story which was much worse. They had been married, then they separated last year, but the woman still came around to collect money for the upkeep of their three children.
Nobody is sure what happened, except the husband who said she just died suddenly and that when he tried to stuff her body in a sack, the body was too big so he chopped it into different pieces and buried them in different locations around Lagos. He then called her father to say she fell into the lagoon and died.
Police say the private parts of the woman, his ex-wife are missing. So probably he did this for ritual purposes
There was another story about a man who threw his daughter’s corpse into a carnal and another about a man who killed his twin daughters because they were witches.
Then there was a mother who killed a baby she carried for nine months because the economy is hard and she doesn’t want to have an extra mouth to feed.
A soon to be married man invested N750,000 in MMM and when the scheme crashed he drank insecticide and died. In the comment section people were LOL-ing, LMAO-ing, talking about how MMM warned people to only use their spare money, and how the man is a weakling, killing himself because of just N750k, no be better man.
We must stop this nonsense.
Mental health negligence is causing us and will continue to cause us too much in this country. This assumption that mental health is an oyibo disease, or it is demonic and must be exorcised out of victims cannot fly anymore. The mind is very fragile, and as Nigerians the daily torture this country puts us through is enough to turn the mind in circles.
Day after day we see people do things that only unbalanced minds can do. It is not only dangerous to them, but to those around them-relatives and friends and also to everyone in the society.
It can start from us, love those whom you call friends and family and mean it. Give an ear to the heavy hearted, offer help when you can, speak out when you need to, do not burden yourself on top I am a strong man or team-alone, talk to somebody!
And if you see a friend’s whose mind is turning in circles, pray for them but also insist they seek professional help.
