What’s genuinely the last good thing you heard about Nigeria?
The fact that we have to rack our heads to actually think of one good news…means we’re cooked, and when the kitchen in the house is burning, who is supposed to save other rooms from burning?
The kitchen has been on fire for so long without any real effort to put it out. At first, it was just smoke and the awful smell creeping into the other rooms. But now, the fire has spread beyond the kitchen, burning through the entire house room by room.
Sadly, many have been affected by this fire. They got burnt to ashes, some survived but retained scars from the fire, some are still nursing the pain from being burnt and yet, some are currently burning in this fire.
How long will this fire keep burning for?
This question is not meant to be rhetoric, but painfully, nobody has the answer to it.
According to the World Health Organization, one in four Nigerians suffers from some form of mental illness. One in four…that’s not a small number when you put it against 200 million people. But somehow, it still doesn’t feel like enough people are talking about it… at least not seriously.
But then again, it makes sense when you think about it. How do you prioritize your mental health in a country that doesn’t even prioritize you? When the same energy you’re supposed to use to heal, to rest, to simply exist without panic, gets swallowed up by survival? The mental load of living in Nigeria is not a metaphor, it is a daily, compounding weight.
Where it gets more interesting is the part where, while some rooms have been burnt and some others are currently burning, there are certain rooms (partially) untouched.
In these rooms partly untouched, a lot is still happening. Recently, the largest clandestine methamphetamine laboratory was found, for the first time, in Nigeria, deep inside Abidagba forest in the Ijebu East LGA of Ogun state. This laboratory is where large-scale methamphetamine was being produced and processed for distribution. With over 2.4 tons of methamphetamine and highly toxic production chemicals worth over #480 billion were recovered. To put this in perspective, that’s enough drugs to destabilise entire communities, and it was being manufactured right in Ogun state.
It gets quite uncomfortable here. With this news, it’s clear that some people inside these houses are also pouring fuel. A whole drug empire, in a forest, in Nigeria…who knows how many more are yet to be discovered?
All in all, trust Nigerians to develop a tough skin even in fire. We laugh at the chaos on Twitter, we turn suffering into content and trending sounds, we become creative with pain. However, there’s a difference between coping and healing, and for a long time, we’ve been confusing the two.
The most painful part is that many Nigerians don’t even recognize what they’re carrying as a mental health issue. It just feels like life because everyone around you seems to feel the same way. Collective suffering has a way of making dysfunction look like culture.
So where does that leave us?
Well, there’s no clear answer…yet, but here’s what’s true: you are not weak for struggling to survive, you are not dramatic for feeling crushed by it, and you’re not asking for too much for wanting your home to actually feel like home.
The least we can do for ourselves and one another, is to stop pretending the smoke doesn’t sting.
