Fears, Deaths, Mourning, and Burials in Times of COVID-19 Pandemic in Nigeria

Abstract

Extant studies on deaths in Nigeria have been conducted without much critical focus on how the public responded to emergency politics or the government’s interventions during pandemics. Fundamentally, this is the gap this research aims to fill. This study focuses on pain events, grieves, and mourning following COVID-19-related deaths. Thus, this study analyzes the intersections between COVID-19 and death discourse by exposing and interrogating the variances, ambiguities, ambivalences, corollaries, and paradoxes amid convoluted public health conversations. This research employed both primary and secondary sources. Primary sources include African beliefs, newspapers reports of past and current pandemics, and radio, television, and social media narratives. Secondary sources include reviews of existing literature on deaths and pandemics. Historical analysis is used in this study, identifying two categories of dead bodies created during the COVID-19 pandemic. The first category is Pandemic Dead Bodies (PDBs) and the second category is Non-Pandemic Dead Bodies (NPDBs). Many concomitants characterizing Pandemic Dead Bodies including stigmatization, apathy, otherization, ambiguities, genderization, demographication, politicization, contestations, and weaponization are interrogated from socio-historical perspectives. Heightening the stress of grieving families are issues around deaths, as burials are postponed or held within the restrictions of National Centre for Disease Control (NCDC) COVID-19 protocols, often with the presence of limited family members of the deceased. Thus, the pains and grieves are not just about the loss of loved ones, but the inability to give them a befitting burial, since Nigerians love to celebrate the liminality of their loved ones into eternity. Likewise, anticipatory grief became more accentuated and aggravated in Nigeria regarding the manner of announcing the demise of some popular politicians who died of COVID-19. Fundamentally, these problematic encumbrances, nuances, and intrigues concerning deaths during the COVID-19 pandemic are historicized. This study concludes that pains, grief, sorrow, death, and burial are historically constituted and configured regarding social, economic, political, cultural, and environmental interactions.