By Busuyi Mekusi

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The platitude ‘from cradle to the grave’ figuratively configures the evolutionary journey of an individual, following arrival on earth and the departure from it, that is like the other side of the coin. Unfortunately, coin-money has since disappeared from the Nigeria economy, given the inflationary pressures that disempowered the naira, causing it to lose values, with certain denominations fizzling out naturally, without the economic-driven process of re-denomination. In recent times, the cascading journey of the naira is worrisome and damaging to the purchasing power of ordinary Nigerians. Like I wished before, may the naira never go the way of Zimbabwean dollar!
Among many others, the cradle represents both an oscillating rockers and the place of origin, nurture, protection or existence. The space between birth and death in human existence is replete with many in-between details that are tantamount to deliberate suspension of the inevitable –death. The moment of death, or the point of departure, as it were, naturally and automatically shots one out of so many unfinished businesses: from food to toileting; from sex to procreation; from labouring to comfort. Either you like it or not, your loss of the familiar earthly elements at death cannot be compensated for by any insurance company.
Nigeria disaggregated opportunities for individual growth and development reminds one of the notion of Haitian mud-cookies and the idea of being fed with a silver spoon. Just like the two remarkable paradox of the city/township (slum) co-existence in the South African socio-economic structuration, the poor in Zamfara State are crying: ‘So help us God’, while the exploitative rich are yelling: ‘So help us gold’, with gold blood used to appease the greed of the vulturic leaders. The rich now garnish their havens with gold, while the poor are maimed and displaced in indigenous communities.
The poor should not go to sleep in their parlous slums as the rich could invade their space for the urbanisation and regeneration that would predictably lead to dispossession. Nigeria space is noted for equal birth, considering the issue of passage, but unequal arrival and lopsided growth. Arguably, Nigeria is a nation of the privileged few, and unprivileged majority, held in the grips of the oppressed. Illustrative of the irony of fact, while the biblical road to hell is said to be wide and straight, Nigeria ‘roads of death’ are sinuous and potholed. Nigerians’ roads from cradle to the grave are riddled with unpaid entitlements, poor access to health care, insecurity, lack of access to good shelter, denied access to education, etc., pointing to a precarious future.
Both unnoticeable and clear good efforts made by respective Nigeria leaders to provide public infrastructures left behind chronic inadequacy and inefficiency. Gowon, during his tenure in office, was said to have stated very categorically that the problem of Nigeria was not lack of resources, but how to administer the surplus that came as a result of oil boom. The boom was not just lost to profligacy but the lack of discretion boomeranged very resoundingly. Just like any natural being, as Nigeria grows and ages, she is fast losing her innocence to the various rapacious dealings of the handlers. In a questionable manner, the drive for decolonisation drags with it the degradation in infrastructural reputation. Gradually, but repetitively, roads have developed gaping holes, water pipes became dry, hospitals turned to disease dispensers, and brain got drained through leaking ‘pipes’.
Traditional patterns of living, with its crudity but safety, have been displaced by the toxics of modernity. The burdens of urbanisation have incrementally forced disadvantaged citizens to still scoop water for domestic use in flowing streams that are contaminated through bathing, washing and other escapades, with diseases such as typhoid, renal failure, cancer, liver necrosis, etc., ravaging mostly impoverished citizens. Members of the struggling eclipsing middle class in most cities are still compulsorily fixated on contaminated borehole and well waters. With the retention and popularity of the traditional modes of burial, shallow and fairly-deep graves dot Nigeria ecological space, even as erosions and environmental degradation attempting the exhumation of these people who were long gone. One may want to wonder why it is important to bother about the ‘resting place’ when the dead may not ‘rest in peace’! As South African continues to manifest the symptoms of postcolonial disillusionment, a black South African recently bemoaned the contaminations precipitated during the burning and emptying of factory chemicals into the atmosphere, as part of the looting-rage that followed the incarceration of the former President, Jacob Zuma. No doubt, the South African space continues to struggle with the implications of the violated past, and wobbles to a gloomy future.
Most Nigeria cities are given to urbanisation of their environments, with efforts made to rescue misused spaces. This is as the environmental master-plans of such cities are compromised by reason of the greed of grabbers and accomplices in government. The political class is also fond of allocating public spaces to themselves, as part of the reckless consumerism they are noted for, and thereby mowed gardens and blocked drains. This is as the various reclamations done would pressure natural waters to flow out of course. The restoration of Abuja master-plan by El-Rufai, when he was the FCT Minister, gave him a national name and record, which fetched him the Kaduna State Government House. One looks forward to his restoring decency and sanctity of life to the citizens of his State, in the face of serial kidnappings of both the lowly and the mighty.
The livings are continuously encumbered, as roads are blocked at will for religious and social activities, without consideration given to emergencies; houses are still used for burials either to own property or preserve the remains of the dead from ritual scavengers; public cemeteries get overloaded in cities, and already used spaces get re-allocated in an obvious instance of implosion, as found in multi-tenanted houses and rickety pubic vehicles, even as human-parts predators and merchants prey on exhumed buried bodies in reckless ritualism and cannibalism. Nigeria psyche gets irredeemably ritualised but stagnated in the face of modernisation and civilisation. Governments at all levels have failed to enhance the quality of life of the citizens, with obvious lack of good houses, hospitals, recreational facilities, education centres, etc., but the over-jump to honour the dignity of the dead, and lessen the burdens of the bereaved.
Death, burial and the socio-political economy of burial rites would pass for a researchable topic in Nigeria academic environment, with Obi Cubana as a case study. Little wonder the initiative of the Ekiti State privately-owned cemetery that has been lampooned by some people. To my mind, the project is an economic attempt to hold the bull by the horn, and shift old orientations of association between the living and the dead, in relation to religion, and cultural opinion, away from the endemic rural towards the urban order. The 260, 000 capacity first privately-owned cemetery, named CitiGate Park and Gardens Cemetery, is said to be located at Eminrin area of the State, away from homes. The facility is believed to have the capacity to avert environmental hazards, and safeguard the health of the citizens. This is more so as the burying of dead people at home pollutes groundwater (boreholes and wells), devalue buildings and reduce aesthetic values of the environment.
As noted by one of the partners, the concept of private cemetery is a universal one, with funeral insurance also desirable to help end the tradition of wastage still associated to our burial rites. With the plan by the operators to accommodate both Christians and Muslims, and build other facilities like halls and churches within the area to hold burial processions and reception, one is reminded of the funeral parlour in Fugard’s Sizwe Bansi is Dead, with its theatricalities, and the need to allocate spaces to specifics about human existence and death.
While the opposition to this project is needless, the idea is a metaphor and reminder that the present and future cannot be held down by the past. However, beyond a good grave, there is the need for a reliable cradle for the living. There must be a quick arrest of the crumbling cradles that would end up marring ‘cemented cemetery’, as it is always good to take care of the living, before treasuring the dead!