Between Ooni, Ozolua

The Ooni of Ife, Oba Enitan Ogunwusi has partnered Empower 54, to create awareness and promote solution to malnutrition in Africa, which currently kills 2.3 million children annually in Nigeria.

According to the founder and president of Empower 54, Princess Modupe Ozolua, Nigeria’s Minister of Health, Isaac Fawole, had declared that 33 per cent of Nigerian children under five years, suffer from chronic malnutrition.

This, according to Ozolua, translated into a disturbing statistics and many innocent lives lost due to lack of sensitisation on early management of malnutrition and access to free treatment.

According to her, Empower 54 succeeded in evacuating the severely malnourished IDP children from Bama to Maiduguri and realised more had to be done to save children suffering from severe acute malnutrition beyond evacuating them from high risk zones for treatment.

“Due to His Imperial Majesty’s dedication to humanity, it’s with great honor that he agreed to lend his voice and passion to the campaign to eradicate malnutrition in Africa, starting from Nigeria and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

“The menace of malnutrition is creeping deeper into the fabric of our society and we must be tenacious in our fight against this colossal beast by creating a better mechanism; adopt policies and strategies that are capable of combating its rapid expansion.”

The Ooni was also quoted as saying, “Africa is the wealth of the world with huge human and natural resources and we must form a consensus that would scale up nutrition projects for the greater developments of future leaders that are being crippled daily by our collective negligence.

“As the co-chairman of the National Council of Traditional Rulers of Nigeria (NCTRN), we require holistic and systematic global blended approach in addressing the shade of malnutrition in Africa. I recognise and applaud months of intervention of Empower 54 in subjugating the spread of malnutrition in Nigeria and across Africa.”