A distressing video trended on social media last weekend. If you love children your heart will sink while watching it. It was about a boy-child who was choking and struggling for life in a footage of about 12 seconds. There were other videos associated with the tragedy. Though his age and name were not given, the boy must certainly be less than 10 years-old. He had tubes passed through his nostrils ostensibly to aid his breathing. But the tubes were crude. And so his breathing came across like sounds from a snoring adult. Every breath in the short video hits the heart like an evil arrow from the bowstrings of a shooter who is adept at shooting to kill. The image was haunting. And then the boy died. It was shattering. He must be the child of a nobody. He may already have been buried in an unmarked grave. In my Igbo part of Nigeria, and probably elsewhere in Africa, no parents would want to behold and be constantly reminded of the burial spot for a child who died so young, almost while still in the cradle.
This depressing incident reportedly happened in Ebonyi state in the south east of our country. It was posted on social media by a netizen who goes by the title of Asiwaju of Igboland. This person may be mimicking the Asiwaju of Yorubaland who happens to be the current president of Nigeria, Alhaji Bola Ahmed Tinubu. Because this netizen and the president share a title, it may just be necessary for the president’s aides to bring the video of the boy that eventually died to the attention of the president. Why? We will return to the ‘why’ presently. The sad story was that no hospital in Ebonyi state including federal government health institutions could readily provide appropriate tools to attempt saving the life of the stricken boy. The father of the child was reported to have lamented moments before the kid died: “God don’t let anything happen to my son! Ebonyi state is your forefathers home, nothing will happen to you. Since 12pm, it’s now they are accepting to treat you. The whole of Ebonyi state does not have a tracheostomy tube to suck out groundnuts… I came back home to Ebonyi with my family, putting everything behind to start a new life but today I regret my decision. Since 12pm I have been running round Abakaliki (Ebonyi state capital) to do an X-ray for my son that swallowed something that has been affecting his breathing and no hospital can tend (attend) to us. I am currently at FETHA (and) they are referring us to UNTH ( University of Nigeria Teaching Hospital), Enugu”. And that’s the summary of how Nigeria happened to an innocent child and his ostensibly grief-stricken young parents.
Ordinarily, an object such as a groundnut lodged in a child’s throat, if that was what happened, should not be a death sentence. Some medical professionals said that such objects can be dislodged within hours with the availability of appropriate equipment and personnel, and the patient discharged from the hospital in hours, at most in 24 hours. Not here. Because we do not care. Francis Nwifuru is the governor of Ebonyi state who was anointed and installed by his predecessor David Umahi, the current federal minister of works. Umahi was alleged to have transformed Ebonyi state in terms of infrastructure which included the establishment of a medical university. It appears the closest thing to achievement by Governor Nwifuru in the health sector was his discovery and arrest late last year of some workers in a primary health facility who were engaged in the business of selling the facility’s branded stationery. The video of the governor’s unscheduled visit and discovery made the rounds on social media.
There’s no intention here to isolate Umahi and Nwifuru, not even Ebonyi state, for the purpose of calling them out or making them the fall guys, and an errant state. No. To varying degrees, what happened to this kid and his parents in Ebonyi state could happen anywhere else in our country. Like Umahi and Nwifuru, the dividends of democracy for our rulers are defined by the construction and provision of infrastructure and facilities that the eyes can see such as roads and white elephant projects like airports. The 700 km Lagos – Calabar coastal highway and the Badagry(Lagos)-Sokoto 1,068 km desert highway are two of such ongoing projects. Whenever our rulers manage to grudgingly construct school classrooms and build hospitals, they barely bother to furnish them with requisite tools and equipment. Once they are done with the aspects that eyes can see which, by the way, are often poorly executed, they leave us to our own devices. Classrooms are hardly equipped with teaching and learning tools, and hospitals are usually bereft of the latest health gadgets and trained, skillful and dedicated professionals and ancillary staff. Our rulers get away with murder because we do not hold them to account. We do not hold them to account because our rulers have systematically and radically weaponised poverty. They make us scramble for crumbs. They make us feel extremely grateful to them whenever they use a little portion of our common patrimony to minister to our basic needs.
A preponderant majority of Nigeria’s rulers are not just insensitive, they are thoroughly wicked. They offer us run down schools while they send and keep their own children abroad for quality education in safe environments. They leave us with hospitals that are actually morgues, worse than ‘mere consulting clinics’ while they and their families travel abroad on medical tourism to treat headaches and toothaches. They throw us to the dogs to contend with death traps called highways as they fly across the country in scheduled commercial aircraft and private jets. While on the roads, if we do not die through inevitable accidents caused by the poor state of the highways, we will fall into the hands of terrorists who kidnap for ransom, or to kill. This is the 21st century, yet more than 70% of Nigerians do not have access to public electricity power supply. We still grope in darkness. The fortunate few who have access grapple with unstable power supply. Businesses and households are in the same dire straits. The miserable electricity supply is routinely priced out of the reach of consumers. Electricity tariffs go up virtually on a weekly basis. Our public universities, research institutions, museums, highways etc. operate in darkness. The University of Nigeria Nsukka and the University College Hospital Ibadan, two premier academic institutions in our country are prime examples of what a country should not be.
Back to Ebonyi State and how Nigeria happened to an innocent child and his now grieving parents. We lost a child because of a medical procedure that involves creating an opening in the neck and inserting a tube into the trachea (windpipe) to provide an airway for breathing. There are many reasons for tracheostomy but in this instance the procedure would have been to bypass an obstruction in the upper airway probably caused by a foreign object. Such a procedure on this child could have provided a secure airway, and bought the medics time to find and remove the suspected foreign object. And everybody would have gone home rejoicing. But no, this one ended in tragedy. And pain. The greater tragedy is that it will happen again. And again. And again.
