SUICIDE BY SNIPER: A POPULAR CHOICE AMONG NIGERIANS - (PART ONE)

He inhaled deeply and loudly, as if trying to savour the freshness of the dusky air. He held a small white plastic bottle with his left hand and a camera device understood to be his phone, with his right hand, to capture the epic moment.

It was barely evening. The yellow sun — seemingly not scorching — filtered through the bamboo trees behind him, playing on the dry leaves on which he sat. Depressed, he looked downward, then upward. He stared ahead. His eyes rolled sideways, seemingly forcing back some sordid tears, some prickly reflections.

Suddenly, he accompanied the white bottle mouthwards. And in two gulps, he emptied it down his bowel.

It was a Sunday in the month of February, a day when believers were expected to be in God’s presence, worshipping. However, Victor Oladimeji wouldn't attend church service like he used to. He preferred to be alone under the bamboo shed in a nearby bush. He appeared to have a much bigger task at hand; bidding this mundane world a goodbye on a sojourn to heaven, where God himself resided. The young lad, Oladimeji, barely 20 years old, wanted to commit suicide — which he did.

Moments before drinking from the white bottle, young Oladimeji had texted his friend on Whatsapp to alert him of his location, where his remains could be found, before he would be wrongly thought to be missing. "Goodbye,” he wrote. “My dead body is inside bamboo.”

Attached to these strong words was the picture of his death note — splattered with blood, beside which a blood-clad razor laid — believed to have been written, signed and snapped in his room. In blue ink, with hobble handwriting, Oladimeji wrote his suicide note on a foolscap sheet, rife with omission signs and strikes, beginning with a short but strong title: ‘THE WORLD IS NOT WORTHY TO BE LIVING.’

He continued: “You as a person need people around you to make life lively. [Yet those] same people are so wicked, cruel and heartless. Why? People do evil to people they ought to help. People are collecting from those they ought to be giving…human feelings are absent from human beings. Why? Is this life worth living [at all]?”

Oladimeji was a first class graduate, who had just bagged his B.Sc from University of Ibadan in 2018, admitted that “although all these [aforesaid] might not be genuine enough for a person like me to poison myself… [nevertheless] never trace my death to someone else but me; I decided this on my own.”

The young lad, honey-fair complexioned, stated in his death note what agent of death he employed for his suicide mission and why. He mentioned how he “personally went to market to buy rat poison” for his own consumption, “instead of giving it to rats”.

Apparently, the rat poison Oladimeji referred to was the small white bottle; the content of which he would later gulp under the bamboo trees. Findings revealed that the “rat poison” is a lethal pesticide named 'Sniper' — a DDVP (2,2-Dichlorovinyl dimethyl phosphate compound), marketed by Swiss-Nigerian Chemical Company — originally meant for the farm, but which has over time been wrongly domesticated by most Nigerians for use as household insecticide and rodent-killer.

“I have thought of series of ways of committing suicide, but I found rat poison [Sniper] as the simplest and fastest way of doing so,” Oladimeji wrote, as if to eulogize that powerful pesticide that has come to his rescue, when other means proved too difficult and discouraging.

For Sniper, Oladimeji was not the first suicide victim. In fact, a few weeks before him, besides scores of unreported cases, swarms of suicide-by-Sniper cases had set the media abuzz.