“Nigeria marked its first year without a single case of polio on Friday, reaching a milestone many experts had thought would elude it as internal conflict hampered the battle against the disease”, The Guardian of London screamed in its news report of July 24, 2015. For Nigeria, it has been a long, tortuous and seemingly endless journey towards the eradication of a disease that leaves its victims destitute of the streets of our country.
In the last two decades or more, we have had to deal with polio and Lassa fever to their varying incidence and prevalence rates. It must be stressed that during the decades the incidence and prevalence growths embarrassingly showed our notoriously inadequate public health sector up as a classical example of our governance failure. Thus, we made the list of countries of the world with excess burden of diseases that had been eliminated elsewhere. Though it wasn’t all doom and gloom. There were also times we scored little successes in containing transmission of infectious diseases, threatening public health and spreading death, only for these diseases to reoccur in places where public health facilities were lacking or public health managers were utterly irresponsible. Take Lassa fever for instance: following the successful containment of transmission in Lassa, Borno state in 1969, it took a few months of crass irresponsibility of our governing elites and the indolence of managers of public health at the time for the disease to roll up itself and reappear in Jos, Plateau state. We learned nothing in later years: the experiences and knowledge gained were locked away by managers of the public health of the state in cobwebbed drawers. While they fleeced resource allocation for control and management of infectious diseases, the poor returned to their old dirty habits and dirty ways of living in poor sanitary and dirty environments to feed on rats, the resilient vectors for the contagious disease. Like death, Lassa fever deviously carried its torch in search of victims in urban slums and the sprawling dank caverns of the suburbia. There were deaths as there were survivors who lived to tell the tales of agony and anguish.
The managers of our public health truly never placed a handle on polio, “an acute viral disease characterized by inflammation of the nerve cells of the brain stem and the spinal cord caused by a virus called poliovirus”, until institutional framework was put in place and do-gooders, workers of the Aid-Industrial Complex and compassionate billionaires like Melinda and Bill Gates came along to help halt the scourge. It wasn’t smooth sailing. There were bumps along the way; cultural and religious bumps shaped by long-held beliefs of parents and fundamentalist clerics who gifted common sense to idiocy by rejecting polio immunization. The criminality of drug manufacturing companies like Pfizer was unhelpful. The Trojan experiment performed on children of Kano who were suffering from meningitis created a cloud of suspicion. In all of this the suspicion that mothers were being immunized to prevent them from enjoying motherhood also grew, giving life to the lie that immunization was about birth control. The criminality of a rogue drug manufacturer became the albatross of the Aid-Industrial Complex.
The cloud of suspicion overhung Kano and beyond for a long time. No wonder Mallam El-Rufai on becoming the Governor of Kaduna state had to publicly administer polio jab on his son to the applauds of those who witnessed what at face value appeared as a symbolic gesture, an innocuous way of highlighting the importance of immunization in the life of a child. But there is a point that appears lost to the symbolism of Mallam’s action that suggests that suspicion of immunization and modern science is still prevalent in northern Nigeria. Mallam’s action has been unjustifiably dismissed by his critics in the social media as sheer fantasy- the fantasy of the father administering jab on his son in the patriarchal north. The criticism is simply that social gendering makes it impossible for any “self-respecting” northern father to emulate Mallam El-Rufai. His critics miss the point. Forget fantasy, representation is about making the real very real; and by symbolizing what every father does, Mallam El-Rufai merely re-emphasized the love-love relationship between the father and the son. Call the love-love relationship fantasy, representation, symbolism, El-Rufai has shown the type of leadership that one expects northern political leaders, traditional and religious rulers, clerics and parents to emulate.
There is also a salient point to be made here about the contributions of compassionate billionaires, Melinda and Bill Gates, to the eradication of polio in Nigeria. Only recently joined by Dangote, they shame those billionaire countrymen and women of ours who distance themselves from moral causes and the problems that confront the poor of our country. The Gates, like the nine female health workers who were killed during their polio immunization rounds at the Filin Kashu and Shargalle Health Centres in Kano in 2013, have shown that they are truly global citizens and true friends of Nigeria. A word for those brave women who laid down their lives so that children of our country live their lives free of polio. We owe them eternal debt of gratitude.
Until July 24, 2014 the last recorded cases of wild polio were from five local government areas in Kano and Yobe states. In effect, July 24, 2015 marked a year without a single recorded case of fresh wild polio infection in our country. Brilliant. This calls for celebration. However, here is the science: “poliomyelitis is expected to occur in a hundred percent of susceptible children and more than ninety percent of susceptible adult household contacts”; and the science also tells us that “polio is transmitted through stool, contaminated food, water and by person to person contacts”. Considering the poor sanitary conditions of cities and towns of our country, the task of attaining Godliness through cleanliness becomes the collective one. We can only stay true to the science by staying clean, eating healthy and by immunizing our children. The journey towards the eradication of polio which began in 1997 is now at its terminal end, yes, we have reached the “milestone many experts had thought would elude us”; but while we celebrate and scream, “polio-free, free at last”, we should always remember that viruses have so many invincible ways of conquering the human habitat. It is well.
*Follow the writer on Twitter @AbdulMahmud1
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