When words fail

IT will be a miracle if the report nested on the front-row of any news platform in Nigeria. Our country’s passion is now a fetish mishmash of wildly-amusing politics, anti-corruption soundbites and win-at-all-cost sporting (or more like football) engagements, with all their assumable addenda. Practically no one is immune. The media is so bitten and smitten. The front-pagers in news arrangement could be worked out in a time that it takes for blepharospasm patient to complete a wink. For the news manager, it is about what the people want. The leaders have also correctly underpinned the following’s desires. They know the led have chosen not to have a life outside the cocoon built for them by the power drivers and their accomplices. The people now cling to the redesigned humanity skewed for them by years of deliberate re-orientation. Sensibilities are now totally dulled to real issues of existence. The control button now oscillates between APC/PDP 2019 politics and anti-corruption rococo. When the skullduggery of both opiates the mind, relief is sought from underserving sporting glories. For individuals, cash-seeking now controls a lifetime, except for those who are fortunate to find real Joy.

I was close to toeing the line with “the trial of brother Kanu” this week until I ran into tragically-innocuous news of a joint report by the World Health Organisation (WHO), United Nation Population Fund (UNFPA), United Nations Children Fund (UNICEF) and World Bank revealing that 58,000 maternal mortality was recorded in Nigeria in 2015 alone. Lord, have mercy.

For some inexplicable reason(s), the news I read moments before running into this, was the striking health workers calling the bluff of the Health minister Professor Isaac Adewole who I must call out for administrative inertia, though globally acknowledged as medicine bright-point. Under him, the sector has gone more roguish than in recent past. He is one falconer his own in the care-giving sector aren’t regarding his breezy voice. It isn’t that the sector was rancour-free before his advent. But things seem to be getting more out of control and my take isn’t about the dirge of a report which would never move Nigeria or Nigerians because such figures have become a common-place around here. In fairness to egbon, the report in focus had nothing to do with his headship of the troubling and troubled sector because he wasn’t minister then. But nothing suggests anything less dastardly would pop up in the 2016/2017 reports. Don’t they say the night is a pointer to the day to expect. Can a sector bejeweled with crisis epaulette all over, return cheering figures?

The administration in town is possibly not fighting the credibility of this damaging report because it could be credited to the much-discredited Goodluck Jonathan-era. It is expected that similar reports for 2016/2017, expected to return higher casualty figures, would be met with the usual official truculence in defending the records of this administration. Nigerians whose lives are being daily devalued as revealed by the heart-wrenching mortality statistics may even applaud such official denial and tag the international bodies busy-bodies being used by the political enemies of the administration to pull the government down, just as the people looked away when the Baratai military was desecrating Amnesty International for daring to pry open army criminality against humanity in the country. So much for the people and their liberators.

Elsewhere, this report would be completely unacceptable. Here, it is a way of life. Many may not even see a big deal in 58,000 pregnant women officially dying in the course of trying to bring on new lives. With our toxic record-keeping, though Nigeria Bureau of Statistics (NBS) must be thumbed up for a re-awakening, it is likely such deaths not captured in the data for the year under review and succeeding years, are even more than the official figure.

Life dips in value ceaselessly around here, so higher casualty rate in another poorly-manned portion of the sector may become an effective argument against any patriotic S.O.S over this huge loss. What about the fatalism theory of explaining away mediocrity and irresponsibility? Without getting into unnecessary ethnic profiling, the epidemic of maternal mortality in the North-East (as revealed in the report) that should ordinarily trigger emergency interventions in the health sector in the zone and other zones including the South West (with the least percentage), may end up in the fatalism corner. After all, the argument is that we must all submit to the will of the Almighty. Yes, but not when our idiocy is costing us nations, that is, if we believe mothers are nations and nation-builders.

Anger over reports like this is usually a rope-a-dope against governments, but of what gains are such past outbursts. Governance appears to have determined codes in our clime and resetting them may take eternity. What would not move those in charge won›t jolt them, even if packaged like hot iron. Imagine, only LASUTH CMD, Wale Oke was the name ringing bell at the presentation of this monumental report. Is it not shameful enough that the country now run on data provided by international bodies, except the monthly revenue-sharing in Abuja.

Nigerians may continue to play the ostrich with their lives. They can continue making themselves available for merchandising prayer for a fee and even get cheated out of the token promised them before shipping them to Eagle Square. They are already voters of akara, bread and N500. That is the value we decide to place on our worth for now and that is what the leaders will keep buying us for. An era is also coming when donor agencies will start buying us for the value we place on ourselves. Maybe then, report like this would generate national uproar and mothers, intending mothers and even men who put them in family way, would march over the land in an unprecedented national demonstration. Until then, we will keep struggling to understand the scandalous people we are.