A Man Almost Died
“Everybody was praying for the man’s life, for the presence of death pervaded the atmosphere of the dungeon that night. The reporter kept going to check up on Eddy, who seemed lifeless as he lay with mouth open as though he was begging God to slow the beat of his heart.”
Let’s call him Eddy. Eddy is not quite 40. He has a history of hypertension, and that calls for eating closely regimented diet and living in closely controlled conditions. He must not be unnecessarily agitated, and must take certain drugs at specically prescribed times to keep his heart pumping at a desired tempo. But Eddy does not appear sickly. If he didn’t become ill, nobody who didn’t know as a matter of information could have imagined him to be hypertensive. He appears cool and well. He is playful, and possesses an infectious mirth that rises from the pit of his stomach and breaks up on his face with a glad bellow. Eddy is in the habit of coming over to the reporter in the presidential lodge at the Alagbon dungeon to tell jokes or hear the reporter’s endless stories, and between the two of them the other people in the cells find the two-some a welcome diversion to the boredom of incarceration. The man is not a journalist, and under normal circumstances, he shouldn’t have found himself locked up in a hell where he must make friends with assorted criminals. He is not the sort of man who will pinch anybody’s pocket. He looks to be a man for whom a little here and a little there will be more than enough.Eddy is not also an accountant, or a bank employee, for people employed in the banks invariably find themselves behind bars, in that a little pilfering in a particular section of a bank can get everyone in the vicinity locked up in the hope that one of them may just knw a little bit more than he is readily willing to admit. A couple of nights in the detention may untie his lips.
The bank officials who frequent detention – both police and the prison – have developed an attitude of deja vu, and they seem to accepte the revolving door nature of their detention with a serene attitude. Some of them carry their burden with a spirit of fun that is sometimes bewildering. Locked up, they tell the stories of how they get to where they are, nearly amost all of them will tell you that they don’t know anything about the fraud that has gotten them locked up. Since they have to stay behind bars often, each bank in Nigeria has a lodge named after it. The UBA lodge, the IBWA lodge and so on. Therefore if an official of the Union Bank is detained, he will head for the lodge named for his bank if that lodge is not already full. They are perfectly sanguine about the whole thing. For Eddy who was an official of the NET and who got locked up at the Kalakuta Republic on the suspicion that he might know about how the NECOM House was burnt down, the dungeon was a strange place to be. Like the reporter, Eddy had developed a sense of resignation to his fate, and his boisterous sense of homour kept him going.
The detention is a leveler, a veritable no respecter of the inmate’s station in life. It is the reason why directors and security guards from the same establishment would sit together at the game of cards. Playing cards helps in killing time, and it is an activity that draws almost all the inmates who are not feeling sorry for themselves as spectators. That afternoon when Eddy took ill, a little crowd surrounded the spot where the game of card was usually played. The only difference was that afternoon, the customary “I’d whip you” was not heard. The air was still, and thefaces of those surrounding the crouched figure were grim. The reporter had just woken from his afternoon nap, when he sensed the eeriness in the dungeon. He got up to see what the proble might be, and he found Eddy slumping and staring wit red eyes. The pupils of his eyes had turned a dull grey, and the other NET directors locked up there said that Eddy was very ill. That was the time that his history of hypertension was made known. Hypertension is a killer, and when it strikes it has the swift ability to make a vegetable out of its victim. It is the commonest source of srokes. The reporter was afraid that Eddy might have had a stroke. He went to the police on guard at the dungeon and told him that a man was dying. The police officer said what was killikg the man? He was told that the man was hypertensive, and that at that moment, the poor guy’s heart might just be bursting. The reporter then went to bring Eddy who couldn’t walk without being assisted. He was taken out inot the oen air near the door of the dungeon, and was seated on a rickety chair propped against a disused acr. He was given a bottle of Lucozade to drink while the police guard was making arrangements to get permission to take the man to the hospital. The guard came back to say that he couldn’t get the permission that night to take Eddy to the hospital, and the poor fellow had to be taken back into putrid, crowded and heated dungeon. Everybody was praying for the man’s life, for the presence of death pervaded the atmosphere of the dungeon that night. The reporter kept going to check up on Eddy who seemed lifeless as he lay with mouth open as though he was begging God to slow the beat of his heart. It was a Monday. By Tuesday, the police had come to realize that a man might die in the dungeon. The guard on duty, an affable fellow for Benue State, said the he would not like a dead man on his hands. Even then, nothing was done until about 11a.m. when Eddy was taken to the hospital along with others who had to see the doctor that day. The inmates in the dungeon felt that Eddy would be admitted while the doctors observed his condition.
But surprisingly Eddy was brought back around five that evening with a bottle of Lucozade, some drugs and a bottle of drip. As soon as he showed up, the reporter rushed to meet him, and realized that Eddy’s condition had gotten worse. He had not been treated in the hospital. What the police doctor, more a butcher than a doctor, did was to send Eddy back to go and drink the bottle of drip along with the Lucozade. But for the fact tah death was in the air, one could have laughed. Drip is not for drinking, as any fool knows, it is supposed to be administered intravenously. By Wednesday mornig, Eddy had become listless, and more dead than alive. He was then rushed to the NET hospital to see one Dr. Sebanjo. When they got there, the doctortreated him while the police guards stood around. The doctor then said that the man should be immediately admitted for further treatment and observation. Of course, the police refused to leave him at the clinic for treatment. They insisted on bringing him back to the dungeon, and promised to return him for treatment after they could have gotten the permission of the Assistant Inspector-General of Police Muhammade Gambo.
Gambo is more like a phantom, his bulky figure notwithstanding, and usually nobody could find the man. Throughout that day, even as Eddy was passing into the embrace of death, Gambo could not be found, and the poor man was left to his fate.
By Thursday morning when the reporter was on his way to court and freedom, the police was faced most poignantly with the fact that their negligence would indeed lead to the death of a whole assistant director of NET. The reporter told the police as he was taken to the court tat he aould write the whole story of Eddy should the man be allowed to die!
©Sunday Concord, March 27, 1983
(Pp.208-211)
