OTARU, a young father who lives and works in Ketu, Lagos, went to a store in his neighbourhood to purchase a popular brand of ‘baby food’ for his one-year-old baby after the close of work. He would discover, later, that the substance he had purchased had all the markings of “slow poison”.
“After taking the food, the baby started to excrete watery stool and this would just not abate,” he narrated. “At first, we thought it was a teething issue, but when it persisted, something told me we should suspend the food the baby was eating, and that was when it stopped.
“We later found out that that particular product was an imitation of the original brand we had been buying for the baby. It even had a peculiar smell, different from those of the same brand that the baby had consumed in the past,” he stated.
Curiously, the agency saddled with the responsibility of offering protection for Otaru and others, the Consumer Protection Council (CPC), simply told him it couldn’t intervene, because the commodity was not “receipted”.
Is it possible for a man to be paying daily for his eventual death? A response in the positive may sound outrageous but it holds true for countless Lagosians who daily patronise poison in the name of appeasing the gods and goddesses in their stomach.
Saturday Tribune’s findings also showed that while many buyers are completely ignorant of what they are spending their hard-earned money on, others don’t simply care. To some of them, it is a case of “something must kill man anyhow”.
Right from the unhygienic environment where the food is prepared, to compromised processed food items, to carbide-enhanced fruits and not-fit-for-consumption cow skin (popularly known as ponmo), residents are daily faced with food items that will, rather than nourish their body systems, send them to early grave.
Death in the air
While poison in Otaru’s case was in form of processed food which would normally take some extra vigilance to detect, some are so conspicuous they can be perceived from afar. For instance, checks by Saturday Tribune, in some local eateries revealed that Lagosians are at risk of food poisoning because many daily essential commodities are purchased from unhygienic environments.
Saturday Tribune visited the Yaba Train Station of the Nigerian Railway Corporation (NRC) and noticed a stench oozing out from a gutter just opposite the train station. And despite the unsavoury environment, food vendors still sold food in take-out packs to passengers waiting to board the Lagos Mass Transit Trains, while traders around the Yaba market ate directly from those food vendors.
The stench from the gutter opposite the train station, which Saturday Tribune later learnt to be persistent, inquiries revealed, is due to the fact that all the filth from the nearby police barracks, including dirt from traders at the Yaba Market Extension located along the rail line, is emptied into the drainage system.
Further investigation revealed that young boys from the police barracks prefer defecating inside the drainage system rather than using toilets located within the barracks. All these have compounded the state of the gutter, thereby turning it into a home of dirt and epidemic.
Speaking to Saturday Tribune, a passenger waiting to board the train, Abigail Okafor, explained that the filthy state of the drainage system and food vendors just opposite it should be a source of concern to health-conscious people in the state. Okafor, who incidentally is a nurse, would want relevant authorities in the state to act fast.
“With the filthy drainage and stench emanating from it, I will never buy food from those food vendors opposite because their foods can easily get contaminated. Flies are everywhere. The same flies that visit the filthy drainage system move around, and perch on their food without them knowing.
“There is no easier way to get food poisoning than this. Some foods get contaminated easily, so selling foods just across the filthy drainage system should be discontinued.”
Mr. Damian Ohuakanwa, a resident at Inoyo Estate Ajah Lagos said the problem that should first be addressed is hygiene. To him, Lagos residents should be made to imbibe basic hygiene practices.
“There are so many things people cook and eat in dirty environments. There dirty habits constitute poison on their own. People who do not know the benefits of keeping their surroundings clean, cannot know when potential food poisoning items are available in the food they cook,” Ohuakanwa stated.
Carbide-processed
Perhaps more worrisome today in the city is the amount of unprocessed food items, especially agricultural products such as plantain, oranges, mangoes and other species of fruits consumed on the go, which are not fit for human consumption. For instance, recent findings by Saturday Tribune showed that a huge bulk of fruits displayed in open markets within the city are actually forced to ripen through the use of carbide.
“When some of these fruits, especially plantain and oranges, are brought from the farm by these market women, what they simply do is to put such fruits in a container. Then they will put hot carbide, which forces the fruits to get ripe in a matter of hours,” explained Alhaja Suliat Adeyanju, a yam seller at Ile-Epo market, in Agbado Oke Odo Local Council Development Area of the state. She claimed to have witnessed the ripening process in that market.
It was also learnt that it is a common practice in the city for people to use Calcium Carbide (CaC2) to ripen plantain within 48 hours, instead of allowing the ripening process to take the natural course of one week.
While Calcium Carbide is used to generate low levels of ethylene gas which can hasten (outside at least) the ripening of fruits like bananas, oranges, mangoes, among others, medical experts believe it is not without grave consequences.
It has been scientifically proven that carbide-ripened fruit, on consumption, has several harmful effects on human health. Besides the fact that such food has cancer-causing properties, it contains traces of arsenic and phosphorous hydride. Consumption of fruits ripened with Calcium Carbide, it is argued, causes stomach upset because the alkaline substance is an irritant that erodes the mucosal tissues in the stomach and disrupts intestinal functions. Experts say chronic exposure to the chemical could lead to peptic ulcer.
Sharing his experience on a social media platform recently, a social commentator, Charles Omole, narrated how he bought roasted plantain during one of his trips to Lagos only to develop stomach upset immediately after consuming the plantain. It took vigilance on his part to discover that the cause of his stomach upset and those of others on that trip was that Carbide-assisted roasted plantain.
Mrs Josephine Agbi, who sells banana at Ewutitun Mafoluku, Oshodi, said she was not oblivious of the development. “I have heard that the banana we buy either in the open market or by the roadside could be laced with harmful chemicals that can cause cancer but I can only select good bananas and leave the rest to fate”, she stated.
According to her, it is unscrupulous merchants who devise means of hastening the ripening of fruits that should be blamed as they do this to solely make quick turnover.
An orange seller at Ikotun market, Yusuf Sahabi, told Saturday Tribune that some sellers had the habit of forcing their fruits to ripen earlier than normal. Sahabi, however, denied ever adding any substance to make his own oranges ripe fast, adding that any fruit that ripens earlier than necessary loses its taste.
“I don’t add any carbide because some customers can easily detect premature but ripe fruits. Some will know when they look at them and others will know when they taste them. And when they discover this, they will not buy, making us incur losses”, he said.
Ponmo
Meat sold in the open markets in the state is not immune to this ‘assault’. For instance, the state government recently closed down the cow skin (ponmo) processing section of the Oko-Oba Abattoir and Lairage Complex, Agege and dislodged processors of cow hide and skin in the complex.
This move was to curtail food poisoning from the consumption of ponmo, after it was discovered that it was a usual practice for the meat to be processed using heaps of burning tyres.
The Commissioner for Agriculture, Mr Toyin Suarau, had noted that this bonfire emitted a thick smoke which spread within the complex and its neighbourhood, adding that the smoke and the unhygienic way of processing the cow skin were harmful to human health.
Curiously, in spite of the warnings, this kind of cow skin has continued to be seen everywhere.
“Honestly, it is worse than we thought”, said Mr Abiodun Roberts, a consumer. “I was once in a restaurant and was served this cow skin that looked very attractive. But while eating it, I discovered it was salty and when I lodged a complaint with the owner of the restaurant, she simply apologised and told me the fault was not really hers.
“According to her, the salt was needed to preserve the ponmo from decaying, since it was coming from quite a distance. What this simply means is that despite the harm excess salt may cause to human body, the major concern of those in that business is simply how to preserve the cow skin”, he complained.
Toast to death
For Lekan, a mechanic who has a shop along Pipeline Area, in Aboru, taking paraga, a local concoction, despite its harmful effects, has become part of his daily routine before settling down for the day’s job.
“It always has that therapeutic effect on me, since it usually relieves me of pain and make s me feel smart on the job”, he stated.
Lekan is not oblivious of the claim that such practice could lead him to his early grave, since it has direct effect on his liver, he simply retorted. “I have been taking this for the past few years and it has never had any side effects on me”, he said.
The case of Akeem, a local gin (ogogoro) patron, is however, different. Although he was aware that the habit could cause renal failure, he said he drank the local gin because of its cost effectiveness. “Drinking beer nowadays costs a lot of money, hence my preference for the local gin since it achieves the required effects at a minimal cost”, he stated. Akeem, who lives on Akinola Street, Oke Odo, is, however, not averse to beer. He drinks beer, if somebody is buying, according to him.
Cancer, renal failure…
The majority of the medical practitioners who spoke to Saturday Tribune agreed that by forcing food items to ripen or produce certain desired results through the use of preservative chemicals, sellers of these food items almost always put unsuspecting consumers in serious health crises.
The doctors revealed that consumers stand the risk of stomach irritation, acute renal shutdown, loss of consciousness and death for consuming these artificially preserved food items. They also called for more interest in research and investigation of all food preservation methods adopted by Lagos sellers in order to arrest an epidemic.
A consultant nutritionist in Lagos, Mr Fasanmi Olabiyi, warned of the grave consequences of using catalysed and unnatural processes in hastening ripening. He said consumers were bound to come down with cancerous diseases after periods of ingesting farm produce preserved with carbide.
He said, “The use of carbide to hasten ripening terminates the photosynthetic process of these farm produce, preventing the normal nutrient and vitamin gain normal in natural process. And this certainly portends grave health implications for consumers. We have about 70 million cells that constantly grow and wear out in our body. The same situation applies to the intake of smoked meat, popularly called suya, and the use of nkawu to soften ponmo. Any unnatural and catalytic method used to quicken the process of food maturity has its artificial biases as well as unwholesomeness”, he explained.
Comparing the artificial preservation to a stillbirth, Dr Richard Michael, a general health practitioner in Lagos, described the nutritional deficiencies prevalent in the use of carbide in ripening plantain and banana: “A patient once came to the hospital complaining of stomach ache. She said she liked to take banana. I asked her to take the banana that had been cut down directly from the tree. She returned after a few days to tell me she no longer experienced the stomach pain, but that when she took the locally-sold banana, the stomach ache continued.
“Every farm produce has its own life cycle and during the natural process some more nutrients are added to it that will terminated when it is forced to ripen. It is just like giving birth to a still-born. You do not expect the baby to be as healthy as the fully developed baby. This is exactly what happens to food products that are forced to mature through artificial means.
“You may be taking fruits and still lack vital nutrients and vitamins in your system. It is because the fruits have been forced to mature. Artificial process terminates the amount of vitamins in food. Even if the process does not cause any harm, it is a waste of money and product as it is more or less chaff on display.”
The Assistant Director on Dietetics at the Obafemi Awolowo University, Dr Obinna Ogbonna, who is concerned with the laboratory analysis of the nutritional content of consumable foods, said that the use of carbide hastens the ripening of fruits and tyre on ponmo does not only deplete the nutritional contents in the food items but also adds metals that are poisonous to the human digestive system, which can cause renal failure, loss of consciousness and death.
“Farm produce do not cause any health hazard if allowed to mature naturally but the use of carbide as a preservative for most fruits and tyre for ponmo certainly introduce a variety of heavy metals, which are not health-friendly.
“Carbide also depletes the natural nutrients in these fruits. Though it makes banana, for instance, to look ripe on the outside, when one eats it, the inside will feel a little hard. It will not be naturally soft and sweet. What natural process does to these farm produce is to convert the etheric acid in them into citric acid which, in turn, softens and sweetens them, but forcing them to ripen through the use of preservative chemical reverses the natural course.
“Some people pour ashes on these farm produce to quicken the rate at which they ripen. Any addition used to quicken the rate at which these farm produce mature or ripen is not natural and catalytic. This means that these chemical alter the produce and are often injurious to human health.
“If one is not careful, it can lead to renal failure. When people take them, they come down with stomach aches and this can lead to vomiting. And when you start to lose electrolyte in the body it can lead to acute renal shutdown, and this can make one unconscious. Some people may die of this if dialysis is not engaged immediately”, he stated.
Ogbonna, who is also the president of the Nigerian Union of Allied Healthcare Professionals (NUAHP), called for an immediate research and investigation into the nature of metallic presence in these preserved food items. According to him, the use of atomic absorption photometer can detect the presence of carbide induced metals in artificially preserved food items.
He said, “It is important to round up these food items quickly in order to check the spread of a possible outbreak. By taking some samples of these food items in the market, using the atomic absorption photometer, we can test for the presence of heavy metals such as arsenic, mercury. These metals are not supposed to be found in food of that nature. When the analysis is carried and we notice the presence of these metals it will be possible to conclude that the food items were forced to ripen”.
Advising sellers and consumers alike, he said, “Sellers should do away with greed because greed is a form of corruption. And since we are in the era of zero tolerance for corruption, getting rich quickly at the expense of unsuspecting consumers is corruption. It is not only when you steal money that you are corrupt; quickening the ripening of a food item in order to make quick money is corruption.
“On the part of consumers, they should be selective of the food they buy. I suggest that they buy the food items when it is not ripe or without preservatives. They can preserve these food items on their own. That is one way to go about it. And if they notice that a food item they bought has been forced to ripen, they should return it to the sellers and stop patronising them.”