Wages of an ailing economy

The economic crisis is taking its toll on homes in a manner never before known in the country.

How can we explain the factors responsible for a mother inflicting razor blade cuts on her uterine son and another slitting the throat of hers or the rising number of suicides, including some teenagers, or even divorce cases?

The woman who caused bodily harm to her son and the one who slit the throat of hers expectedly made the headlines early this week. While the law enforcement agencies are busy trying to unravel how the criminalities took place so they can arraign the perpetrators, we can only editorialise on the subject with a view to ensuring that such occurrences do not become features of our settings.

The boy who was tied up by his mother before she set out to cut him at various spots on his body had spent his mother’s money, which he confessed to anyway. After the confession we would have expected that she would have pardoned him and warn him not to repeat the offence. The loss of the paltry amount of money perhaps was overwhelming for her and she could not bear it.

As for the other woman who slit the throat of her son, it reportedly had to do with society’s opprobrium over a child born out of wedlock and whose father she could not identify – something she could not contain. Her sordid action can nonetheless be traced to frustration over her seeming hopelessness.

Let us be our brother’s keepers by reporting to the law enforcement agencies or even community leaders or chiefs when we suspect such crime is about to be or even being committed by dejected personalities in the places that we live.

The poor victims neither begged to be born nor are they responsible for the sorry state of their parents and the country.

It is our prayer that those responsible for steering the ship of state would appreciate, more than ever before, the repercussions of their non-performance. Their waking up from an obvious slumber would go a long way in eradicating the situation which drives some to do the untoward.

The fallouts from the downhill movement of the economy are varied; suffice it to point out though that the reactions to them are weird, sometimes bloody.

We should not allow the effects of an ailing economy to drive the most affected victims to act in the manner which have triggered this commentary.

The statistics are not easily available to us but these are certainly in the domain of law enforcement agents. The number of suicides in the past year and husbands smacking their wives or their dependants and the rate of divorce are on the ascendancy. A comparative analysis of these cursorily would show that there has been an upward movement of the anomalies when compared with the previous year.