There is no art to find the mind's construction in the face
- William Shakespeare's Macbeth, a Play.FOOD is cardinal to the survival of man, no doubt. If the singer who sings about the ills and plusses of the society, the thief who is wakeful all the night breaking into people’s homes and stealing their property, the witch whose plan to kill the child and her ominous intention as often announced by the owl, the farmer who toils day and night to tend the field for the survival of man and the teacher who teaches our children to have knowledge cannot find FOOD to placate the worms of their bellies, HUNGER will hinder them from carrying out their noble and ignoble plans. FOOD is indeed the central pillar of the existence roof top of everyman.
Yet, as important as food is to the nurturing and sustainance of man, as emphasized above, food can sometimes prey upon man with its hand full of fatal paradoxes and ironies in the regalia of unexpected deaths.
Such dark ironies and paradoxes happened, a couple of days ago, to some people in Ikuehi area of Ihima, a district of Okehi Local Government Area, Kogi State.
At evening time, after the toils of the day, a compound, some of whose members would in the next few hours become corpses, readying for shrouds and graves, had heaved a sigh of relief seeing some food items for the making of their supper.
They had some cassava flour, a small tin of palm oil to manage, ground fingers of okra, little seasonings, few pieces of Pomo, the sun-dried or roasted and boiled skin of some animals. Pomo is meat or fish to the poor and people in the slum. The ill-fated Ikuehi compound had all this; their children all happy, milling round their mothers in the open kitchen and hurrying them up to finish cooking the food on time. But unknown to them and their mothers, their meal was shaping their coffins and mounds. Ironies and paradoxes, you will say.
And the food was ready. Everyone was served, nine of them and a dog were all served. It was delicious to them. And they ate it with relish. They were sure of an uninterrupted sleep, the kind in which hunger would not force them to remain sleepless on their tattered mats, counting the rafters of the ceiling to distract their acidic hunger before the day break which looked wickedly slow to them.
Alas! The expected blissful night turned out to be a night of tragedy.Before daybreak, two of the nine had cried of stomach pain and died shortly after. Shock and mourning had crept in and seized the town. Wailings got increased with additional two deaths. Hospital could not offer any help. “We suspected food poisoning. But we are managing it.” The hospital said
No one can manage the poison that reared its ugly head from the house of death. The poison hissed at the hospital and killed another person before it spared the remaining four. It never forgot to kill the dog that also ate the food with its masters.
As soon as the bad news spread, as bad news always does, it drew public interest. The Chairman of Okehi Local Government, Hon. Monday Amoka, promptly visited the tragic scene, expressed his disbelief, his condolences and called for peace, assuring the people that the directive he had received from the State Government that investigation would be carried out to ascertain the actual cause of the death would commence without hesitation.
“What a tragedy! He hollered. In a twinkling of an eye, four people are already dead ( One later died). It could be poison, Investigation is on to know the cause. A directive to that effect has been given by the higher authority.Please, let us remain calm.” He pleaded.
Apart from the LGA Chairman, many Social media commentators and experts had one or two opinions or suggestions to pass on the issue.
“I am suspecting wall gecko. Maybe it fell into the soup and released its deadly poison in the soup. Wall geckos are very poisonous and dangerous.” No. I suspect food poisoning from cassava cyenide. You know, cyenide is the natural chemical compound called cyanogenic clycoside that is capable of releasing toxic hydrogenic cyenide. Cassava produces this compound as a natural defence mechanism to protect itself against pests and animals.”
In a similar vein, another expert made an informed comment,” It is not all of us that are aware that there are two types of cassava. We have tubers of sweet and bitter cassava. The cassava that is sweet contains lower level of cyenogenic glycosides. And it is safer to prepare it for consumption.
The bitter cassava is the opposite of the sweet one; it contains much higher concentrations of toxic contents. It needs serious pressing to be good for eating. I believed it was this variety that these people (the dead) must have made into the tapioca dish that killed them. Life is full of paradoxes. The food was meant for their survival, but it sadly came with deaths for them. He sorrowed
Somebody had earlier attributed the cause of the death of the five people to wall gecko. Wall geckos are just unfortunate reptiles.
Rigorous research has shown that they carry no fatal poison that can cause death. “If distressed, a wall gecko might bite and it’s bite feels like a minor pinch. It does not inject any venom….” The research revealed.
Then, what killed the five? Cassava cyenide? No, it was neither cassava nor wall gecko. Most fingers in the community pointed to soup poisoning. One man revealed to Nightingale that it was the soup that was poisoned ” Test from the laboratory has been carried out and it revealed that it was the soup in the pot that was poisoned. If you saw the soup in the morning, it had turned pitch black. It was as black as charcoal. One devil from the pit of hell was responsible for the soup poisoning and for what reason, I really don’t know. Why will anyone kill another man. Now that he alone had killed five people and a dog, is the wicked man going to live in this world eternally? He asked rhetorically.
Of all the comments made about the unfortunate deaths of our brothers and sisters who are mainly children from Ihima and even the dog, the one the songbird found sadly amusing (not because she said it in rotten English) was the one by a spinster.
The bachelor girl said inter alia: “And somebody advising me to marry from Ihima, say wetting Key.
“For the lone woman or girl, Food poisoning is particular and restrictive of IHIMA . No….! it happens elsewhere. Ohuepe is not in Ihima, yet, a confirmed food poisoning case had recently claimed precious lives there. Mopa-Moro, a Local Government Area in the Western Senatorial District of Kogi State recently cried to high heaven following deaths by food poisoning. Nagazi area of Adavi LGA was not spared by food poisoning. If tragedies such as these cannot draw tears from our eyes instead of marrital clowning by the old maid, our humanity has taken flight. I am afraid.
Exclusive of Ihima? Not at all, Nightingale insits. The sprawling town of Ibadan, Oyo State, where death by food poisoning had gulped twenty people as widely reported in the media. There is a legion of examples. In December 2023, eighty pupils at St James school in Osogbo took ill after eaten the meal provided by government’s school Feeding Programme. Is Ibadan now in Ihima that the ancient city was also visited by food borne diseases? Death of one must and should always remind us of our own death, O you lone woman, why?
This was the unsoiled information from the Federal Ministry of Health and Wefare, “Unsafe food causes nearly 50 million illnesses and over 53 thousand deaths annually in Nigeria. Across Nigeria and the rest of Africa, high rates of food borne illnesses are linked to biological pathogens, chemical toxic such as cyenide in the improperly processed cassava…’ Food poisoning is not exclusive of only our people here in Kogi, even in Nigeria.
Then, if it was found out that it was someone that poisoned the soup that killed the people in Ikuehi, the question we should be asking is, ‘Where has our humanity gone? Why will anyone want to kill the other? What measure can we put in place to make sure that dastardly acts such as this does not happen so frequently? And Shakespeare said, ‘ There is no art to find mind’s construction in the face,’ how can we read the mind of the enemy that plans to do us harm? Very difficult, you will agree with the bard.
In 1986, in this same Ihima, Obeiba area of Ihima, a food poisoning of greater proportion happened. And the people prayed to God never to allow such mourning happen to them again. The suspect, a woman and tenant of one of the victims was never properly brought to book.
Sharing her experience with The Graphic Newspaper, the only survivor, out of the fourteen that ate the pounded yam that the tenant allegedly fatally poisoned in 1986, who pleaded anonymity said among other things that:
“My father at that time could be said to be a wealthy man. He was a big time farmer and a contractor at Ikere Ekiti. He married four wives. My mother was the senior wife and so, she was the one manning the home front for my Father.
Because of his status, feeding was never our problem. When my mother cooked, it was like it was meant to feed more households, not ours alone. Very generous woman. We, the children were always busy carrying food to our neighbors. This was called Uvona in our language, the sharing of meals among households and compounds. Evil was not this common then. Mutual love was the name of Ihima of that time. What happened was first of its kind in the community.
“On this fateful day, I just returned from school. As I cried for food, my lovely mother went and opened the pot that was still on the fire at the open backyard of our house, (Not now, that many houses are fenced because of all sorts of evil) and gave me some yam. I ate it without suspicion.
Now, the food was done. Everyone was served including our neighbors as usual. Then, there was trust. Our parents were one another’s keeper. So, we ate the food. My senior sister and I ate together. Before daybreak, my mother, my sister and two other had some terrible stomach pains. In all, thirteen people died. I was the only survivor after years of moving from one hospital to the other. One hospital that my father carried me told my father that the pounded yam poison had completely eaten up my womb. My father carried this trouble in his mind until I married and started given birth without hindrance that the old man told me what the doctor told him. “Such is the miracle of God,”she said gratefully.
No one can really understand the mind of man. The woman who did this was our tenant. She was always coming to my mother food items and money and the kind hearted woman would spoil her needs. Yet, she wiped out many of my family members and neighbors from this planet earth. Can I call this envy and jealousy?” She asked rhetorically.
The Graphic: What advice do you have for people so as to avoid things like this from happening to them?
The Victim: Many pieces of advice have been given by experts which include maintenance of personal and environmental hygiene.
For me, it is unsafe to cook outside of the house. Even if you cook inside your kitchen, you must still monitor it unless you are a lone in the house. Fence your house if you can. Communal love is no more with us. Our humanity is fast dying. And we see this in almost all aspects of of our life. If I tell you that I have never recovered from that sad episode of my life, forthy years after, you will not believe it. I still cry, wondering why?
– YJ Itopa, Journalist and Poet writes from Lokoja.
