“We have been agitating for justice for 11 years and have largely been ignored and forgotten for all these years. We therefore wonder the sudden interest shown in our problems by some groups. While we appreciate their concerns, we wish to urge them to desist from making sentiments that are at variance with our stand.

Above is part of a press statement released to Kano journalists on November 7, 2007 by the forum of Pfizer victims, expressing worries about some intruder groups trying to sabotage their success in reaching a treaty and securing their rights from the Pfizer Company. The statement reads further: “In as much as we appreciate their (groups) concern and interest in our struggle, we shall at the same time not close our eyes to allow them to jeopardize the current achievements recorded on the matter.” During the press briefing anchored by the forum’s chairman, Alhaji Mustapha Garba Maisikeli, hundreds of indigent parents, men and women, mostly residents of the suburban quarters of Kano city, narrated heart-rending and nerve-chilling stories of how their wards were either cold-bloodedly murdered by the Trovan drug test or rendered into lifetime handicap to no avail. Some of the still surviving victims, whose pictures were shown to the press, had their limbs paralyzed or totally incapable of moving or walking.

Some were rendered deaf and dumb as a result of the past eleven years Pfizer drug test. Altogether, they were tales of woes and whores.

Genesis of the pathetic story was in 1996 when a pandemic of Meningitis struck many children in Kano state, which was then under a military government, when some volunteer groups both within and outside Nigeria rushed to their rescue, to provide treatments and drugs to patients of the disease out-break. This gave Pfizer a convenient ground to put its Trovan drug to test on the innocent and desperate patients, but the result of which turned into a tragic and fatal one. Some parents of the affected children narrated instant harm of death or worsened health of their children after taking Pfizer drugs. However, some parents could not easily identify the cause of the worsened condition of their wards, until quite later, when some good Samaritans raised an alarm about the damage caused by the Pfizer Trovan drug. In spite of the discovery of the side effect of the drug, nobody had the courage or any Knowledge how to go about seeking redress and the rights of the victimized children at the first instance. When later a section of Nigerian press published the incident, some few individuals in Nigeria as well as in the United States instituted court cases against this action by the Pfizer Company, joining the innocent and helpless parents of the victims in these cases. Since then, the matter has been lingering in silence with intermittent newspaper stories on the court proceedings, which further gingered up Pfizer to rise to the challenge and to save its neck from the image cracking incident. With the huge amount of money Pfizer spent on hiring the services of veteran lawyers to win the case and save its image all proved a fiasco and to no avail. The latest frantic effort to kill the matter was during the tenure of the recent past President Olusegun Obasanjo, through whom the Pfizer sought to gain an official pardon or any way of to let the matter lay in abeyance.

Luckily for the victims of Pfizer drug test, the intervention of the current civilian government of Kano state helped to give more credence and official backing to their struggle for their rights in the issue. With the ouster of President Olusegun Obasanjo, the hope for Pfizer to get away with it is more or less jeopardy and the victims’ fight is on course to victory. Yet, as it normally happens with certain selfish intruders who usually cash in on opportunities such as this to make ulterior gains, some fake groups began to gate crash and pass comments on the issue, pretending to be the victims’ representatives. To this, the Pfizer victims’ Forum further warned “We wish to also emphatically state that the Forum including its recognized leadership had at no time encouraged or permitted anybody within or outside the Forum to make pronouncements on the Pfizer issue on our behalf”. If this message would successfully get across to the right people and groups and if positively accepted by them, it would certainly facilitate further, the stage of reaching an out of court consensus between the two parties in dispute. The Pfizer Company with its gigantic wealth of capital base of international status would certainly loose much less, as compared to its image, if it decides to pay damage to its long frustrated victims. The damage would have to be substantial enough to compensate the pains encountered for this entire long. With the official backing in the matter, the damages must not come at a give away amount.

ISA MUHAMMAD INUWA, is a journalist in Kano, Nigeria.