I wake up almost daily seeing dead bodies. It’s one of the things that this crisis has bestowed on us. Dead bodies flying around social media platforms on the daily. Every time I felt I had become desensitised like the one day I was having breakfast and scrolling through fresh corpses in my WhatsApp inbox, I am somehow reminded of my humanity by other such events. This weekend, the story of the young boy that was stabbed in Deido was one of those events.
One of the best movies I have watched these past few years is called “Nightcrawler.” It tells the story of a guy, Louis Bloom, who is a borderline psychopath. He finds his calling in chasing policemen as they solve crimes, videotaping the events and selling it to news stations. He gets so good that he starts following criminals just so he can tape them before the crime, to the extent that one day, he films a gruesome murder and sends a live feed to a TV station at news time…before the police arrive at the crime scene.
We all have that one person in a WhatsApp group who is kind of like that. You know, the one person who forwards any and everything and doesn’t stop no matter how much he is cautioned? But although one can be indulgent with such an individual, I find it hard to understand how medical personnel will film a teenager at the cusp of death as an attempt to reanimate him is being made. All the while her colleagues stand around and no one thinks to caution her. It befuddles me.
I find it hard to understand how a TV station will film the lifeless body of a child on a stretcher and his poor father crying bitterly as he discovers the child he has nurtured for 18 years and had bid goodbye to just a few hours before, lying there inanimate, and show that on prime time TV. It befuddles me.
I do not understand how a medical doctor would allow that same father to discover the fate of his dead child in what appears to be a hospital corridor with other medical personnel standing around. No privacy. No decency whatsoever. It befuddles me.
I still try to understand how a policeman would film an interrogation as he asks questions to what appears to be a commercial sex worker and the video appears on social. Don’t even get me started on that soldier who takes a selfie of himself with what I want to suggest is an Amba boy in the background. A proud display of him killing his brother. It befuddles me.
We have been calling into question, time and again, professionals in their field of work and how they go about that. I cannot count the number of times I have seen people complaining about customer service here. But this particular incident leaves a bitter taste in the mouth.
Smartphones, unfortunately, have turned a lot of us into Louis Blooms. Our vanity metrics have changed with it and now it’s a race for a me-me-me first seat. It has brought out the worst in many of us. And just as much as we flip it out to film ourselves and show to the world that we are living a semblance of “the life” so do we whip at a first reflex to document things that we do not necessarily need to document. Or at the very least not document at that particular time.
But to blame the smartphone would be steering the conversation in the wrong direction. We are just a failed people. And we are failed professionals. If this is what we see that is recorded, imagine what we do not see.
This poor child’s death and what ensued at that hospital is perhaps an opportunity for us to call into question our different professional practices and ask ourselves where we are failing as professionals. It’s not just about the medical corps. I believe that sometimes if one part of the society is failing it is usually because another part of society is not holding it to account.
It would start with the Minister of Health meting out severe sanctions to all those who were present in that room while a cardiac massage was being administered to that boy. But knowing how this country functions, I have a pretty good guess how that is going to do.
As you can see, I don’t really have much to say today. At this point, I only wish that the family can find solace and can bury their child with some dignity.
- Wandji Wilfred.