The Plateau organ harvesting case

TO all intents and purposes, the story of Mr Noah Kekere, a fraud who masqueraded as a surgeon for years and operated on an indeterminate number of patients in Jos North Local Government Area of Plateau State, speaks to the festering rot in Nigeria’s health sector. At the moment, residents of Yanshanu community are still in a quandary following the revelation that the man they had regarded very highly for years and who had operated on scores of victims at Murna Clinic and Maternity Centre, seven out of whom have come out to tell their chilling stories, is a quack after all. Kekere is reported to have routinely harvested the kidneys of his victims. According to the chairman, Yanshanu Community Development Association, Alhaji Jamilu Baba, all of those who had undergone one form of surgical operation or the other at the clinic in the past had been asked to go for tests to confirm the state of their kidneys.

Before the bubble burst, ‘Dr Noah Kekere’, popularly known as Dr Yellow, had plied his trade in the community for over 18 years. It was the case of one Mrs Kehinde Kamaru, who reportedly had  appendicitis but continued to complain of stomach pain long after she had been operated upon by Kekere and had to be referred to the University of Jos Teaching Hospital (JUTH), where the harvesting of her kidney was unmasked, that put paid to his atrocities in the community. Interestingly, when the police picked him up, Kekere reportedly pleaded that what he did to the woman was the work of the devil, although he did not indidicate whether he had given the devil his share of the money regularly collected from the woman’s husband. Police investigations  would later reveal that Kekere, a BSc and a Master’s degree holder in economics, had only attended a nursing school, abandoning his programme midway. The illegal hospital has since been shut down and the ‘doctors’ who had assisted him in performing  surgical operations arrested by the police.

Again, the state chapter of the Nigerian Medical Association (NMA) distanced itself from Kekere. In a statement issued in Jos, the chairman of the NMA in the state, Dr Bapigaan Audu, and the Public Relations Officer, Dr Istifanus Bintum Bako, said that based on the body’s investigation, Kekere is not a medical doctor. The statement read in part: “Diligent investigations by the association have revealed that he is a quack pretending to be a doctor. Further information will be made available following the conclusion of the investigative processes initiated by the NMA as well as the Nigeria Police, respectively.” Strangely, shortly after he was arrested and detained at the police headquarters in Jos, Kekere was reported to have feigned mental illness and was rushed to the psychiatric section of JUTH, where he was released after medics determined that there was nothing wrong with him.

This case is heartrending, to say the least. Just how could a quack have owned a clinic, operated on many patients for years, and harvested their organs without the authorities stopping him in his tracks?  The fact that a criminal calling himself a medical doctor without the requisite training and certification operated a somewhat official clinic for many years, harvesting patients’ organs, underlines, yet again, the extent of the abnormality that dominates life in Nigeria. The country has gradually become  a place where just about anything could be contemplated and done without regard for the rules or decency, and without any authority being bothered about the state of things. It seems that the country only pretends to have a government in place, without any of the structures of government evidently functioning and working well. For how could a fake doctor set up medical practice for years in an urban city without any disturbance from government and societal structures, attending to unsuspecting members of the public with such devastating consequences?

The Plateau State branch of the NMA has been quick to disown the fake doctor, but where was it all these years when Kekere was perpetrating his infamy? And to think that the so-called intelligence and security services of the government were all in place while he was busy harvesting the organs of hapless citizens in a supposedly recognised hospital! The illegal establishment had public identification notice, but the structures of government on tax and payment for signboards and allied matters did not identify the place as fake. The bottomline is that government and those who arrogate to themselves the business of running it must come to the painful realisation that the country is in a terrible state.

There is a need for urgent and radical attention to the disturbing situation. The government must work out remedial steps to reestablish a modicum of order in the country. This would include investigating how the medical infamy in Plateau State happened for years without the government and the society having a whiff of what was going on. Such a thorough investigation could help to unearth what failed and what need to be done to forestall such a development going forward. It would also include ensuring that the fake doctor is made to face the full wrath of the law for his horrendous acts.