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Silent “Murders” In Nigeria By Anthony Akinola
Nigeria is arguably one of the most religious nations in the world and it is also, ironically, one of the most crime-ridden. In the not-too-distant past, the death of a Nigerian in controversial circumstances was headline news and a cause for sombre reflection. Today, the most heinous crimes are accepted and regarded as one of those things. Even when 500 or more people have been murdered in ethnic or religious confrontations, our governments tend to play down its seriousness. All sorts of murders are committed in Nigeria but silent ones occur with monotonous regularity.
Maybe the issue one is aiming to address here is not murder per se. “Murder” is simply the unlawful premeditated killing of one human being by another. However, the death of one human being could occur at the hands of another through culpable negligence – a circumstance known in criminal law as “unjustifiable homicide”. The death of Mrs Stella Obasanjo, erstwhile First Lady, is one example.
Mrs Obasanjo had visited a clinic in Marbella, Spain, sometime in October 2005 to undergo liposuction in order to reduce the size of her abdomen. She would later die because of complications arising from the careless and negligent manner in which the operation was handled. Her Spanish doctor was jailed a few days ago for culpable homicide, fined and barred from medical practice for three years. He was a qualified surgeon, incompetent though he proved himself to have been in these circumstances.
Of course liposuction surgery can hardly be the priority of many, otherwise a lot of people with embarrassingly fat tummies would be queuing up to go under the knife! However, the number of deaths arising from negligence in our hospitals would have had many doctors as prison inmates or ex-convicts! Worse still is the number of deaths at the hands of those who claim to be what they are not – “quack doctors” as Nigerians would rather call them.
The quack doctors were, and still are, popular in rural Nigeria. They are individuals who have little or no training in health delivery but somehow dabble in medical practices. Not too surprisingly, these quack doctors are held in esteem by their ignorant and poor “clients”. They administer drugs and have no qualms about injecting their clients for ailments that do not necessarily require an injection.
Talking of injections, many Nigerians believe in their effectiveness for all sorts of ailments including a headache! They seem to be sceptical of any treatment that does not include the prescription of an injection. Needles for injections are rarely sterilized and some could be as awesome-looking as those used in sewing up cocoa bags! Many killer diseases get easily transmitted when the same needles are used in injecting different patients.
Injections are supposed to be administered intravenously but one can recount an instance when one person had consumed in a cocktail of native gin what was supposed to be injected! This was sometime in the 1970s when the person in question told this writer that he believed it worked more effectively that way.
Hundreds of our peoples die daily through self-medication or the negligence of others. They die from diseases that are badly treated, not least because they have been improperly diagnosed. What about someone who died a couple of years ago due to a diabetic ailment that was initially assumed to have been some kind of an attack? Patients tell their “doctors” what they think the problem is, without the latter making an effort to find out what the real problem could have been.
Drugs in the Nigerian market could be fake or expired. Fake tablets could be manufactured from anything whitish, be it chalk or cassava. The Obasanjo administration, to its credit, made laudable efforts to take fake and expired drugs out of the Nigerian market. It is important to continue to sustain this effort as manufacturers of fake drugs could always revert to old ways.
But who are we to blame for the silent murders in our society, other than the purposeless governments we have had since independence in 1960? To the credit of the great Obafemi Awolowo, he had as far back as 1948 identified health and education as priorities of our national development when he, among others, founded the defunct Action Group (AG). He put what he believed into practice when he was Premier of the defunct Western Region between 1952 and 1959. Sadly, no post-independence national leader has matched his vision when abundant oil wealth could have transformed Nigerian society into a modern nation. What we have had instead are mostly the kleptomaniacs and idiots.
The health of a nation is of paramount importance. The United States of America visits and revisits its approach to health issues periodically, so also does the United Kingdom and other purposeful nations of the world. Health is hardly the most favourable topic of discussion in Nigerian parliaments, as Nigerians are consigned to self-help while the rich and powerful seek the best healthcare for themselves and their families overseas. The medical records of our president and key leaders are at the disposal of foreign nationals, while mere speculation about them could spell trouble for a daring journalist back home!
A purposeful government would know how many doctors there should be in a given population, and such a government would train its nationals to meet that need or recruit more from outside if necessary. Well-equipped hospitals and healthcare centres would be built by a government who cares about the well-being of its own peoples. The Nigerian nation is crying for a sustainable health policy and the time for it is now!!!
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