By Kingsley Obom-Egbulem
I won’t forget that weekend in a hurry. I had just rounded off a 3-day meeting in Abuja and was rushing to catch my flight back to Lagos when we met this unusual traffic jam on the Abuja International Airport Road. Not sure what was going on, the driver of the taxicab I was in decided to ask the street hawkers; who apparently were making the best out of the situation.
“Oga na Yar’Adua wife dey do fund raising o”, one of them told us in pidgin English. Meaning “Sir, Yar ‘ Adua’s wife is having a fund raising event”.
In less than four hours, about N7billion was said to have been raised out of the N10billion naira needed by Turai make the dream of the center a reality.
Most state governors especially the PDP governors at the fund raiser were falling over themselves to impress Hajia Turai Yar’Adua. They were committing huge state funds to this project; funds one analyst said would have been enough to resurrect some of the run down public hospitals in their states and even send health workers on critical training courses. But they didn’t do that. Instead, they came to Abuja and “invested” it towards the building of Turai’s N10b state of the art of Cancer Centre.
It is over one year now and we are asking; what is happening to the International Cancer Centre project believed to have been influenced by a visit in 2008 to the MD Anderson Cancer Centre in Texas by Turai?
Turai:did her dream for an International Cancer Centre fizzle out with her "office"?
Turai, like we all know, is no more the first lady of Nigeria and any Nigerian can guess how much influence and credibility she has that can be leveraged to either drive more funds for this project or even the vim needed for its completion. It is also not known whether or not this project was part of a larger government plan for the health sector or it was just Turai’s dream which was never accommodated either in the health budget or even the National Strategic Health Development Plan Framework(2009-2015). Now, if the latter was the case, then where are we in this Cancer Project? Where are the experts(assuming there were any) who formed part of the think tank for the design and implementation of this project?
These questions are coming against recent launch of a Women for Change Initiative by Mrs. Patience Jonathan. If Nigeria is still what is, and the first lady is not called to account, these are state funds about to be squandered. And it pays to ask what have happened to the ones used for similar projects in the past.
Before the International Cancer Centre project, Turai had mobilized female AIDS activists and advocates, women groups and wives of governors in the country to launch the Women Coalition Against HIV/AIDS. This campaign concept was allegedly designed by former Health Minister who was then Chairman of the National Agency for the Control of AIDS(NACA), Professor Babatunde Osotimenhin. That project gulped a lot of money still. What is happening to that coalition today?
Shortly before Turia left the “office of the first lady”, she did set up a skills acquisition centre at the Maitama General Hospital, Abuja, “for the training of special patients in income generating trades by the National Directorate of Employment (NDE)”. These “Special Patients” are supposed to be women and other patients affected by the HIV/AIDS. Ideas! ideas! ideas! Sometimes, you want to wonder where these ideas are coming from considering how much they weigh on the sanctity and sanity scale.
Patience:The new Dame on the block.A redemptive mission or another spending spree?
In a country where accountability is an alien it may not be hasty to state that these projects have achieved their main objectives; top of which was to swell our list of venal millionaires (or perhaps billionaires)with our without necessarily putting a health system or providing a template on which we can sustainably solve our myriad of health problems. Some of these projects certainly were not planned for the long haul else we would have been feeling the impact by now whether or not Turai is in “power”.
Expressing concerns over the Cancer Center shortly after the fund raiser, a UK based Nigerian epidemiologist, Chikwe Ihekweazu gave an idea of how Nigeria can gauge whether or not this project was another drain pipe or an institution designed to last.
“We hope she’s been advised on how to build cancer education programme across the country to inform people how to detect early tumours. We hope that her advisers are planning a screening programme, a referral mechanisms from primary health care centres to Abuja. We hope that she is being advised that it is necessary for the knowledge, skills and equipment necessary for Pap smears, Mammographies, Chest xrays and other means to detect tumors etc…We hope that they are advising her on the skills and capacity to manage this centre and that there is a clear strategy on how this center will interface with the rest of the country’s health system.”
Too many questions, concerns and doubts.
Please read this article by 234next.com for more updates
NIGERIAN HEALTH JOURNAL 