Death in shortlet: Chidinma Ojukwu and a modern Nigerian tragedy

We seem to think that evil is outside us. Indeed we believe we know where it resides and that it is in other people. This follows Jean-Paul Sartre’s point that ‘Hell is other people.’ The logic is simple: if hell or evil is other people, then evil must reside within us because at some point we are other people.

Some weeks ago, news broke that Chidinma Adaora Ojukwu, a 21-year-old Mass Communication student at the University of Lagos, had killed the Super TV Chief Executive Officer, Mr Michael Usifo Ataga. She was paraded before the Nigerian media and subjected to cacophonous interrogations by them. What is unclear is why the media have taken on the role of the police as interrogators of suspects in what has become trial by media and social media, it’s a poor but popular cousin. In one of these rounds of media spectacle, she was questioned without legal representation, which presented the clear risk of implicating herself and jeopardising her case. This of course breaches her right to a fair trial. Furthermore, there is no corroborating evidence to attest to her guilt or innocence. If she did kill Mr Ataga, was it murder or manslaughter? Yet she has been subjected to a public trial and her guilt concluded even before the case has reached a court of law.

The real courts in Nigeria are now the courts of public opinion, which in turn subverts or inverts and thus reduces the role of the courts to mere sentencing agencies.  This is dangerous. It is dangerous because it is the crude democratisation of the criminal justice that produces the lynch mob who dole out jungle justice on the flimsiest of evidence. This case is currently sub judicie, still under legal proceedings and according to the principles of jurisprudence, the case should not even be discussed. But who seems to care? I myself am guilty of my own criticism even though it is here discussed not to prejudice the case but to point out something tragic about the persons involved and about Nigerian society at large.

First: this young woman’s account of the alleged incident cannot completely be relied upon, even after a confession has seemingly been extracted from her. For example, she claimed that she and her alleged victim, Mr Ataga were ‘high’, but what does ‘high’ really mean? This is a vague term that describes varying degrees of mental state that range from mild disorientation to being completely ‘spaced out’ as to have no control of one’s faculties. Where along this spectrum should we mark her degree of ‘high’ or indeed that of Mr Ataga? We do not know. If she was ‘high’ – presumably low is boring and not a place to be – how would or could she recall the exact details of what happened, what she did, and how she did what she said that she did?

We cannot and should not conclude from her ‘confession’ with regards to her guilt or innocence. Did she act alone or were others involved? She mentioned that she ordered food for ‘all of us’ but who were ‘all of us’ – just the two of them or more than the two of them? She may be old enough to smoke, drink and have sex but she lacks the maturity and depth of experience to handle the gravity of her predicament and the emotional consequence of this murky episode, she finds herself in or brought upon herself. Appearing before the cameras this vulnerable, feeble looking 21, now stripped of the glamour that might once have enhanced her features, the fresh, delicate, innocent university student features, now looked careworn, lost in a fog and like a wandering lamb caught in the glare of the blinding lights to which she had suddenly been exposed and to which was unaccustomed.

What arrangement brought her and Mr Ataga to this bolt-hole? Was it to discuss the affairs of the Nigerian state – Restructuring or Separation – her forthcoming exams or the Pauline letters, particularly the one to the rich Corinthians, who also loved the good life? Or was it just sex? Apart from food, drink, sex and drugs, and a movie, apparently nothing of significance transpired in that room. It all seemed an interminable waste of time, which ended in a waste of a life and the destruction of another.

In one account she described how she granted Mr Ataga his first sexual advance, albeit with reluctance, but refused a second. Because ‘you don’t help me, you don’t assist me in anything, but yet you just play with me around…’ In response, he handed her his ATM card to ‘withdraw what you want’, she said. But that was not what she meant, she added. She did not say what she meant, suggesting that money was not the motive because if it were then the ATM card with its access to his money would have sufficed. So, if sex and money were not her motivations what were the reasons for consorting with him in the first place? She mentioned the words ‘help’ and ‘assist’ both of which translate into care. Perhaps what she wanted was care, care as in help, care as in support, care as in assistance, and care as in someone to be there for her? Not all help, care or assistance is about money, and money sometimes papers over the cracks in most people’s empty lives. Whether she wanted care or not she certainly needed care of some description. Then again, using the deceased card, she proceeded to withdraw cash from the ATM. ‘I needed money’, she said, and ‘he was sleeping and I tied him up.’ But why? ‘For him not to attack me’, she told NTA News.

So from where did the knife come? Did she bring it with her or did she peremptorily retrieve it from the kitchen while seeking to escape a lover turned assailant? Was there in fact a kitchen in the room; where exactly was the knife – by the sink, in a cupboard, in a kitchen top? If she was ‘high’ how did she have the presence of mind to reach for a knife?

But events have moved faster than commentators can catch up. In the days after the news broke, she confessed to the killing of Mr Ataga but since has changed her story. New revelations suggest a deeper and sinister interplay of dramatis personae further suggesting that matters are not as we had been led to believe and that her initial confession was in fact entirely false. So what is one to believe and upon what evidence? See why her confession cannot be relied upon since it changes like the chameleon picks up the surrounding hue.

Chidinma fascinates us because she represents the genderization of evil. She is Eve, Delilah, Jezebel, Salome, the Femme Fatal, the temptress that seduces, enchants, and beguiles with a poisonous sting in the tail, which is her sexuality. Each of these women brought down mighty men, from Adam to Samson and John the Baptist. Women fear her because she threatens their men and them in turn while men are attracted and lured by her sexuality because even though the bee may sting there is honey at the bottom of it. Yes, that bottom, that rear end to which the man’s gaze is always fixed as she sashays down the street and the cheeks undulate, alternate in rhythmic shakes, like the beads tied around the waist.  The femme fatal fascinates because she is a paradox, at once inviting and castigating, nurturing and destroying, beautiful yet beastly. She incorporates contradictory or bipolar personalities that make her irresistible, which is why men cannot resist her and women hate her. With Eve it was the apple, with the modern woman it is sex. But men use sex too, only they call it power. Sex and power alternate, one time residing with the woman and at another time with the man. In power there is sex and in sex there is power. In which case we are all women and we are all men, all possessing contradictory personalities, features and qualities. We are that hell that others fear.

But to drink and smoke and have sex is a kind of reductio ad absurdum of life. Sad, but Nigerian society has reduced human existence to the quest for wasteful material comfort. Because once obtained, what do these girls spend the money on? – Brazilian hair, Gucci bags, Louboutin shoes and the latest worthless glamour brands they believe would enhance and elevate their status beyond compare. In Nigeria, young men are committing suicide at an alarming rate under the pressure of modernity. People’s mental wellness is deteriorating, fuelling the need to fill the void, with drugs, money and sex. This vicious circle is taking its toll on young lives. Something definitely is missing in the lives of the Nigerian youth now spectacularly demonstrated by the case of this young woman and for which she most definitely sought amelioration.

Chidinma Adaora Ojukwu is a modern Nigerian phenomenon, a product of a socio-cultural system in which money, sex, drugs and social media have become the defining characteristics of the youth, in a deadly cocktail the consequence of which is damage, destruction and death. She is young, not even in the prime of her life. She is a student, who should be dreaming of becoming somebody in life, ‘an actress and singer’ she said. But those prospects now lie in strewn across the floor of a non-descript motel room along with the blood of the dead man with whom she consorted. Many like her seek a bright future but through a narrow path that leads almost exclusively to the door of a ‘short-let’ not to study but to recline on a sofa with a drink in one hand and a smoke in the other and the round of sex in between. The ‘short-let’ itself is a metaphor of a kind – a short stay, a shortened life, all sacrificed on the altar of an easy life.

This hapless girl has little knowledge of her own psychology or the push and pull forces under which she appears to be no more than a marionette. She lacks consciousness of the factors that have conspired to deal with her this particular destiny. Where did it all go wrong? Was it at birth, her upbringing or was this a more recent development? When was her fate sealed and by what or whom? Perhaps she was seeking a father figure even though it is said that her father is alive or perhaps she has been scarred by the death of her mother. She may not have answers to these questions even though a lecturer at her university appears to have the answers when he claimed that it is probably ‘not the first time she is doing it.’ How does he know?

A phenomenon now exists in Nigeria, popularly known as the side chick – a horrible sobriquet that is certain to force its way into the Oxford English dictionary. The side chick, I believe, is a young single woman, who is the mistress of a married man who maintains and sustains her by the largess of money and other gifts in exchange for sexual favours. Married men having affairs is not new, but the side chick phenomenon is new if only because it professionalises the very idea of the mistress and elevates her into a category that is mid-way between a prostitute and goodness-knows-what.

But in our focus on Chidinma Adaora, we should not forget that life, Mr Ataga’s, is lost. There is a wife, – although her role in this tragic episode has been called into question – children that have lost a father and a mother that has lost her son. So for what exactly did this man die? Perhaps Chidinma is a cold, callous and calculating killer, whose plea of innocence hides a disturbing pathology. Perhaps her motive was money after all and she killed because she did not get what she wanted. Perhaps she had accomplices. We may never know the complete answers to these questions because no one really knows what happened in that motel room, or delved into the abyss of her mind to psychologise the damage that resides there just as few have sociologically dissected the society that gave birth to such a phenomenon.

This is no mere a personal but a modern-day Nigerian tragedy, the tragedy of a young girl now almost certainly irreparably damaged, even if she survives this ordeal. It is a tragedy of a man who has lost his life; the tragedy of media chasing a story to feed an impatient and voyeuristic public sensational headline, the tragedy of a dysfunctional law enforcement agency happy that it has got its culprit and a legal system relegated to the periphery. I should not remove myself from this picture-making story, which is an easy thing to do, because I am also the other, part of the people gawping at the scene of this tragic incident. This girl should be on campus studying Mass Communication but finds her as much a victim of mass communication. She flew too close to the sun like Icarus and had her glued-on wings, like false eyelashes, melted. Falling back to earth she has hit the ground with a heavy thud. Who knows whether she killed this man or whether she acted in concert with others or in self defence. What is certain is that as a society, we have all concerted to create Chidinma Adaora and glue on her wings, urging her to fly as high as she can and she did fly, high. But now on the ground, we are now ready to kick her, condemn and cast her into the forgotten sea, because by scapegoating and extricating her from society as evil incarnate, we assuage our own guilt in the part we have played in her life story. May the soul of Michael Usifo Ataga rest in peace, just as I hope and pray that Chidinma Adaora finds the peace that has eluded her thus far.