It is tragic that a culture that prides itself as communitarian and solidaristic is the one that makes no investment of resources and efforts to save one person from the clutch of avoidable death.
By Sam Amadi
We Africans pride ourselves and our culture as focused on life. We criticise some of the social practices in the western world as cultures that deny the sanctity of life: practices like abortion and euthanasia. Because we believe in solidarity and community relationships we proclaim our society one that values life. May be it used to be so. It is no longer so. Things have fallen apart.
Across our country there are endless ceremonies of death. Everywhere we see deaths, preventable deaths and needless and casual deaths. The worst is that communities seem insensitive to death and incapable of taking basic actions to protect life. The general impression one gets from the stories and events we witness in Nigeria is that we have taken it for granted that death is now our badge of honour and therefore we ought not to interrupt our frivolities to stop one more death. Ironically, we bury the dead in a manner that suggests that death is a big deal. But we allow death to occur in a manner that suggests that the death of a person is nothing to worry about.
Yesterday I watched a La Liga match between Barcelona and Cadiz. Sometime towards the end of the match, a fan on the stand had a medical emergency. He had a heart attack. Immediately the match was stopped. A medic in the Barcelona team rushed a defibrillator to the Cadiz goalie who ran to the stand to throw it to the medics on the stand. Later, another medic on the field rushed to give a stretcher to the medics in the stand to take the fan for treatment. The match was halted until the fan was rushed to a nearby hospital for resuscitation. The match did not continue for another 40 minutes. The players were taken off the field until the President of Cadiz football club announced that the fan has been resuscitated and doing fine. Later, the match reconvened for the remaining 10 minutes. Both the coach and the President of Barcelona told everyone that life is more important than football. Football is just a game. If the fan had died, the match would have been postponed, they said.
It is amazing how the entire footballing community in that stadium reacted to a mere medical concern on the stand. It is amazing the degree of responsibility everyone bore to make sure the fan on the stand was stabilised and prevented from dying from cardiac arrest. This is not a player and not an official. Just a fan.
I can imagine what happens in Nigeria. Recently, a player died because when he fainted there was no ambulance and no medics on ground to revive him. Even fellow players and officials on ground did not move with any determination to save his life. He did not count much. Just one person.
How about our hospitals? Does any doctor or nurse really bother much about saving just one life? Do you see in the actions of our doctors, nurses, and other health workers any real commitment to save life, just this life, just any life?
It is tragic that a culture that prides itself as communitarian and solidaristic is the one that makes no investment of resources and efforts to save one person from the clutch of avoidable death. In our culture today, any probability of death becomes a reality of death because no one really cares about preventing death anymore. We are now inhabitants of the culture of death.
In truth, those cultures we call cultures of death are really cultures of life because they are willing and ready to invest resources and efforts to save life, any life. Ours is now the culture of death because we now don’t give a damn about preventing deaths.
• Amadi is a lawyer, teacher and public policy expert.