Can anyone prevent another person from committing suicide?

Suicide is illegal in many countries. Yet people commit suicide every day. 

That’s because suicide is almost impossible to prevent. The prospective suicide is usually very withdrawn and uncommunicative. He/she may also be a master of bluff. So he/she can put on an act that’s deliberately calculated to reassure his/her companions and family that everything is hunky-dory.  Before they know it, he or she is gone.

They will cry; they will even threaten “to follow” the suicide into the grave. But nothing can be of any use. For death is final.

The question is this: what about nations? What if a nation of many million people, decide to act, or refuse to act, in such a way that the entire populace is placed at risk of committing collective suicide? Can that also be impossible to prevent?

That’s a difficult question to answer, for unless one is a trusted member of a cult, one would never realise that collective suicide was contemplated by the group. The leader of the cult (who usually sows the idea) would take some members into his confidence and not others. He convinces those in whom he reposes confidence to recruit others whom THEY can confide in. And before the world knows it, out comes a report that states:

QUOTE:  On November 18, 1978, Peoples Temple founder Jim Jones, [led] hundreds of his followers in a mass murder-suicide at their agricultural commune in a remote part of the South American nation of Guyana. Many of Jones’ followers willingly ingested a poison-laced punch, while others were forced to do so at gunpoint. The final death toll at Jonestown that day was 909; a third of those who perished were children. UNQUOTE

The above report shocked the world and was discussed in many articles published around the world. Yet, an almost carbon-copy version of it occurred in an incident that took place in Kenya in April 2023:

QUOTE: Body bags are laid out at the scene where dozens of bodies have been found in shallow graves, in the village of Shakahola, near the [Kenyan] coastal city of Malindi, [in the south of the country] on April 24, 2023. The number of people who died in connection with Kenya’s doomsday cult [had] crossed the 400 mark, as detectives exhumed 12 more bodies on July 18, 2023, believed to be followers of a pastor who ordered them “to fast to death in order to meet Jesus.” Pastor Paul Mackenzie, who [was] linked to the cult based in a forested area in Malindi [was] in police custody, along with 36 other suspects. UNQUOTE

We read such reports and we wonder at what we might consider to be “the naivety” of the hundreds of people who can be taken in by purveyors of snake-oil to end their lives in such a ghastly manner what shall we say of people who do NOT want to die, but who deliberately close their ears to scientific knowledge or/and common sense and act in such a way as to court death all the same?

One would say (wouldn’t one!) that at least those who died, after swallowing a pastor’s word,  did something they believed would enhance their spiritual standing in the after-life that they were so eager to enter? Compared to them, wouldn’t the self-harmers who perished out of stubbornness or ignorance not be regarded as worse knaves by objective assessors of their collective action?

Ah, the word is out! I hereby proclaim that if Ghanaians continue to destroy their water-bodies, thus exposing their offspring and their offspring’s offspring to the possibility of a shortage of drinking water in the near future; especially as they have been warned that even if they conserve their water-sources, the dangerous phenomenon of climate change may deprive them of water (anyhow) they will expose themselves to be amongst the worst and most stupid people Nature ever put on this earth.

For people would ask: didn’t the Ghanaians ever hearse that a few thousand years ago, the Sahara was NOT a “desert” but a green piece of territory as well-served by water resources  as Egypt, the country to which  most of the Sahara’s inhabitants fled, when their own waters dried up as a result of climate change?

Who would defend this generation of Ghanaians and their complacent offspring, when it is pointed out to them that they did not need to wait to see the effects of galamsey on the physiology of young humans and that the use of mercury and cyanide in galamsey operations had already been detected to deform humans foetuses in Ghana by 2017 or even earlier?

So, Mr Ghanaian high climber, as you caress your fat pay-cheque; as you sip champagne and your imported bottled water; as you bite into your medium-grilled fillet mignon

and betake yourself and your family to Dubai for a change of air, please do get know that you will be counted as much of a nation-murderer as the most illiterate aboboyaa joy-rider, who does not know that other road-users also have the right to take their turn to drive on the tarmac!

Is that all you got your high education for, really? What influence to you exert on a society that does not regard water as so essential that when it is wantonly destroyed, it amounts to an act of WAR?

Kai! 

If only one could go and be born elsewhere, far away from galamsey! But it cannot be done.

So, all men and women of goodwill must shout and shout and shout – until our voice is heard and the Nation turns its anger on those who would kill it stone dead.  For the selfish love of the cursed metal called – gold!