No Dignity for the Dead – Abdul Mahmud

By Abdul Mahmud

“Viewer discretion is advised”. Those were the words I posted last week on X alongside images of the slain NSCDC officers. Their remains, shamefully, were being ferried through Okpella, the rocky village on the northern tip of Edo State, on the back of an open pickup, exposed, and stripped of dignity and honour. The post went viral, but what struck me most wasn’t the virality. It was the quiet shame that I felt. Shame which rests not only on a country that refuses to be shameless; but, on all of us who inhabit a country where death strips away every vestige of dignity, and where the state treats the lifeless bodies of its citizens as garbage. To suffer indignities in life and then again in death is a cruel double jeopardy. In many ways, yes, it is. But, it stretches far beyond the narrow frame of double jeopardy. Ours is a country where citizens are endlessly assailed by sermons that insist that only one road exists, the sole path to progress, as Nicanor Parra once described in his Young Poets. Yet, what kind of road is it when it denies all other possibilities? What kind of choice is it when it is no choice at all? Our citizens are compelled, sometimes gently, and at other times brutally, to walk, crawl, or run along that solitary road, even when it winds toward perfidy, even when it spills into ruins. And so conformity becomes the law of survival. To dissent is to court attacks of state-sponsored thugs. To refuse is to invite brutality. What remains, then, is the bitter option of submission or the lonely courage of taking the high road, uncertain where it leads; but nevertheless certain that it cannot end in the wreckage where the other road does.

But, the sight of bodies heaped on the open back of a pickup van is no isolated incident. It is a grim ritual, repeated so often it has become almost ordinary, a practice woven into the fabric of our public life. What should shock us into silence has been dulled into routine. The van, meant for the commerce of goods, becomes a moving bier and an automobile pall-bearer of sorts bearing the anonymous remains of citizens whose lives were cut short. Only a few days ago, before the latest image surfaced, I had shared another. It was of a family of three, their lives brutally cut short in Abuja by reckless Agberos who wrested control of their Sports Utility Vehicle. Their bodies, denied even the solemnity of dignity, were gathered like baggage, flung into the back of a police pickup van, and driven off as though they were nothing more than discarded cargo.

My op-ed, “The Heart of Darkness in Our Capital”,  came from that grief; grief sharpened by rage at how our country, in life and in death, strips its citizens of value.

The examples are endless. A man is killed in a road accident, and the Federal Road Safety Corps swoops in. Their method? Hurling the body into a waiting pick-up, as if clearing wreckage, not handling the remains of a human being who once had a name, a family, a story. Someone slumps and dies in the street, and the National Emergency Management Agency shows up. Their officials, with their plastic forks and gloves, lift the body like remains into a pick up van. No decency. No dignity. No respect for the dead. We like to pretend that the measure of a society is how it treats the living. But the truth is this: the measure of a society is also how it treats its dead. And by that measure, our country has failed, woefully. Ours is country accustomed to violence. We see it daily in the news, on our timelines, in our streets. But beyond the physical violence is another kind of violence: the violence of indifference. The violence that says a corpse is nothing more than matter to be disposed of. The violence that strips away the last fragments of dignity from people who, hours before, were alive and breathing.

What makes it worse is that this is not merely the conduct of individuals. It is institutional. The very institutions of the state tasked with saving lives, managing emergencies and securing our roads are the ones who dehumanise the dead the most. Their uniforms, their badges, their trucks do not dignify them. They become, instead, instruments of humiliation. How do you explain to a child that her father, killed in an accident, was thrown like a sack into the back of a vehicle? How do you comfort a mother whose son, felled by a stray bullet, was lifted with iron forks into a pick-up? These are not isolated stories. They are our everyday reality.

In countries where institutions are built around respect for life, there are systems for handling the dead. Ambulances arrive with body bags. Coroners attend scenes with stretchers. Emergency personnel are trained in dignity, in discretion, in respect. The dead are covered, shielded from the public gaze, handled with the same care given to the living. But here, we display our dead as spectacle. A body on the street becomes a sideshow, a circus for prying eyes. Passersby whip out phones, officials fling corpses into trucks, and life goes on as though nothing happened. It is not that our citizens lack respect for the dead in private. In fact, they honour their dead in ways that are deeply cultural, deeply spiritual. Funerals are elaborate. Rites are sacred. Families spend fortunes to give their dead dignity. But between death and burial, when the state intervenes, that dignity is erased. What we see is not just negligence. It is the collapse of decency. It is the result of years of underfunded institutions, untrained personnel, and rulers who do not believe that citizens deserve dignity, whether dead or alive. Consider this: in many developed countries, there are morgue vans, coroners, and protocols for disaster response. Here, we have battered Hilux trucks doubling as ambulances, and men with bare hands doubling as coroners.

And no one citizen is outraged because the idiocy of treating the dead with indignity has long been normalised. But dignity in death matters. It matters because it affirms our humanity. It matters because it says to the bereaved: your loved one was valued, even in their last moment. It matters because it preserves the humanity of the living, who must one day face death themselves. A country that cannot respect its dead cannot respect its living. The two are inseparable.

So even at the moment of writing this, I am thinking about those images. The officers in Okpella, whose service to their country ended with humiliation. The family of three, whose final journey was made in the back of a truck. The countless others, unnamed, unremembered, whose corpses were flung, tossed, and discarded under the sun. These images will not fade from my mind’s eye. They will linger. They will scar. They will continue to remind me that our country has become so numb to death that it cannot even perform the simplest act of decency: to cover the dead, to carry them gently, to give them the last respect.

Enough is enough.

Our citizens must demand better from the institutions that handle emergencies and disasters. The Federal Road Safety Corps, NEMA, the police, the NSCDC, and all others must be trained and equipped with proper vehicles, body bags, and protocols for handling the dead. Citizens must insist that government allocate funds, not just for roads and uniforms, but for the small, human things that preserve dignity. Stretchers. Ambulances. Training. And beyond resources, we must cultivate a culture of respect. Every official must be made to understand: the dead are not waste. They are citizens. They are human beings.

Still, every citizen owes it to those officers in Okpella and the family of three. Every citizen owes it to every nameless victim of our broken systems. Just as they are remembered for how they lived, they must also be remembered for how they were treated when life left them. The treatment we give the dead is not a matter of ritual alone; it is the truest mirror of the regards we hold for the living. When bodies are flung into open-back pickups and paraded through our streets as if they were dirts, it is not only a desecration of the dead, it is a desecration of us all. Each of those pick ups carries more than corpses; it carries the evidence of a country, hollowed of compassion. It is a rolling indictment of our citizens who have allowed their institutions to forget tenderness, and of the state that has surrendered dignity at the altar of convenience. In those moments, stripped of reverence and decency, we see not just the fate of the lifeless, but the measure of the living; and how far we have drifted from what it means to be human.

Yes, we are on the very road that our citizens are daily told is the only path to progress. Yet, as the late Chilean poet, Nicanor Parra, reminded us, “Too much blood has run under the bridge to go on believing that only one road is right”. The road they preach cannot be the way. Look around: bodies are lying everywhere, as silent witnesses to the falsehood of that promise.