Get Guardian on GoogleBy Bode Babatunde
In the quiet hours of a night in Lagos, a young professional stands on the precipice of the Third Mainland Bridge, battered by compounding economic pressures, rent defaults, and the suffocating isolation of modern urban life. The decision to step forward or step back is not an act of malice or a breach of civic contract; it is the final, agonising collapse of a mind overwhelmed by pain.
Yet, under archaic provisions embedded in Nigeria’s penal codes—such as Section 327 of the Criminal Code and Section 231 of the Penal Code—this person is viewed by the state not as a patient in critical care, but as a criminal awaiting a cell block.
When the Nigerian Senate recently floated renewed proposals to impose jail terms for suicide attempts, it triggered widespread public outrage. But beyond the shock lies a profound institutional failure: How can a modern legislature contemplate jailing a mentally unstable person who desperately needs medical rehabilitation? Are we to believe the Senate is entirely bereft of seasoned psychologists and medical experts? To propose jail terms for suicide attempts in contemporary Nigeria is a profound failure of empathy, an affront to medical science, and a direct contradiction of progressive health policies.
A mental health crisis mischaracterised as a crime
Decades of global psychiatric and neurological research have established an unshakeable truth: the overwhelming majority of people who attempt or complete suicide are experiencing severe mental health distress, clinical depression, acute trauma, or profound psychological crises.
Under the crushing weight of such conditions, human cognitive capacity, emotional regulation, and rational decision-making are severely compromised. To treat an acute psychological emergency as a criminal offence is a grotesque mischaracterisation. It assumes that a person standing on the edge of despair possesses the detached clarity of a premeditated criminal rather than the fragile consciousness of a patient suffering a medical breakdown.
Law is designed to deter voluntary, calculated wrongdoing. Deterrence fails entirely when applied to a mind where the survival instinct has been overridden by unbearable agony. You cannot threaten a drowning person with punishment for struggling against the water.
The mechanics of fear: how criminalisation drives up fatalities
The most devastating consequence of penalising suicide attempts is the underground culture of silence it enforces. When an attempt carries the explicit threat of police arrest and imprisonment, the state builds an impenetrable wall around those who need help the most.
Fearing social stigma, criminal records, or incarceration, survivors and their families are heavily incentivized to conceal what has happened. Instead of rushing a distressed loved one to a hospital emergency room, families often hide them away, terrified of law enforcement intervention.
Tragically, this culture of fear backfires with lethal consequences. Fearing discovery and legal prosecution, vulnerable individuals are often pushed to ensure their attempts are final and fatal. The law, ostensibly enacted to preserve life, ends up driving desperate people toward higher mortality rate.
Clinging to obsolete colonial hand-me-downs
This brings us to a stark historical irony that our lawmakers refuse to confront: the very penal codes used to criminalise suicide in Nigeria are colonial relics handed down by the British in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
One must ask our distinguished senators: Are they unaware that these colonial-era codes used to punish the broken are entirely obsolete, considering that our original colonisers abandoned this practice decades ago? The United Kingdom decriminalised suicide and suicide attempts under the Suicide Act of 1961, recognising the barbarism of punishing the distressed.
For the Nigerian legislature to stubbornly cling to abandoned colonial laws—while the nations that authored them moved into the light of medical progress—is an embarrassing display of legislative inertia.
A global isolation: Where else is despair a crime?
As our lawmakers draft punitive bills, they isolate Nigeria from the community of progressive nations. Can the Senate name a single civilised country today where attempted suicide is still treated as a crime punishable by imprisonment?
Across the democratic world—from Europe to the Americas, and increasingly across progressive African nations—the legal consensus has shifted decisively toward decriminalisation. Civilised societies recognize that human life is preserved through empathy, safety nets, and healthcare accessibility, not through the shadow of prison gates.
A glaring contradiction with national health frameworks
This punitive crusade also stands in direct opposition to Nigeria’s own progressive legislative advancements. In recent years, the enactment of the National Mental Health Act marked a monumental shift in how the country views psychological well-being, rightly classifying mental health conditions as medical emergencies that demand care, protection, support, and rehabilitation.
When a legislature considers jailing suicide survivors while a parallel national framework guarantees mental healthcare rights, it creates a policy contradiction of the highest order. Punitive laws actively undermine public health goals by criminalizing the exact patients the health sector is legally mandated to protect.
Prisons: The ultimate incubator for despair
Even if one were to entertain the punitive logic of incarceration, the reality of Nigeria’s correctional system renders it utterly indefensible.
Nigerian prisons are notoriously overcrowded, underfunded environments designed for penal custody, security, and deterrence—not psychiatric treatment or psychological rehabilitation. Throwing a traumatised, fragile human being into a congested cell block exposes them to heightened violence, squalor, and profound isolation, virtually guaranteeing a worsening of their mental state.
Toward a compassionate state response
Public health advocates and legal experts agree that the primary duty of a compassionate state when a citizen survives a suicide attempt is protection, care, and support, not prosecution.
A civilised society responds to despair not with prison bars, but with clinical intervention, psychological counselling, and long-term community support systems. Nigeria’s legislative energy should not be spent dusting off obsolete colonial laws to punish the broken. Instead, resources must be channelled into expanding mental health infrastructure, establishing toll-free 24/7 crisis hotlines, and dismantling the toxic social stigmas that isolate the vulnerable.
Suicide is not a crime against the state; it is a distress signal to the community. When our Senate learns to answer that signal with medical grace rather than a prison sentence, Nigeria will finally take a vital step away from legislative barbarism and toward true civilisation.
Dr Babatunde wrote from London, UK.
