ANOTHER DISASTER, ANOTHER MISSED OPPORTUNITY

In a previous post i titled ‘One missed opportunity attracts another.’ It was the issue of the carnage in Yobe that happened close to Nigeria's centenary celebration and President Jonathan addressed the Nation at the centenary celebration without using the opportunity to properly address the terrorism issue and give Nigerians the reassurance of good leadership that could bring the dastardly acts into an end. That was a missed opportunity, and it has attracted yet another one.

Monday 14th of April now tagged “black Monday” in Abuja was another stain in our Nationhood. Another disaster struck. The dastardly act happened fast, it happened early and as quick as it happened it spread the wave of sorrows, tears and blood. Emergency response no doubt, but lives already lost in dozens. Within 24 hours latter over a hundred girls were kidnapped from a secondary school in Yola. ‘It never rains, it pours‘.

While Nigerians recounted these harrowing experiences the President continued his political crisscrossing of Nigeria from Kano to Oyo. In Kano it was political campaign, with pomp and pageantry.  Whereas in Abuja Nigerians and non Nigerians alike scampered to assist the wounded in every way they could. some went as far as donating blood. Even non Nigerians did so.

It seemed the President lived in a world of his own. What message does this send to the perpetrators. A father who attends a party while his house suffers the anguish of hoodlums is not likely to be able to fend away the hoodlums for good. Yes president Jonathan is the Father of the Nation, and as a father he has a lot of responsibilities to wake up to.

Even the sleeping confab was jarred from its slumbers as voices resonates of threats to halt the confab in view of the insecurity which had continued to devastate our nation with a reckless abandon. One cannot but ask the question, when would we be able to jolt the President. What is the president’s acceptable casualty figure or rather  when do we get to the tilting point.

in another clime, some pundits would ague that one tilting point of President Obama's campaign last year was the humane response to hurricane Sandy. In spite of the nearness to election, President Obama visited the storm ravaged areas and showed enormous empathy. Even as he continued his campaign the presidential media people continued to show the president's continued concern and monitoring of the events.

This humane act; some would say was politics, earned president Obama a lot of points. At least it made the New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg endorse the president after the storm hit. Big lesson here. Its not election year in Nigeria, yet the president anxiously continued his political crisscrossing. In Kano the welcome was less than cordial, at least not with the response of the broom wagging fellows who ensures they swept off the feet of the visitor they never welcomed. Lesson learned is that even when we play politics, it should be with humane outlook. That way the people tend to believe you more.

Why can we not get the same kind of Obama response from our politicians or rather when would we get such a response. Its just one missed opportunity and then another. Again the president missed yet another opportunity to straighten things. The violence and dying pattern has now become part of us. Politrics is a non desideratum at this time. Nigerians are dying and we cannot continue to stand aloof. Or how many more needs to die!?

PHOTO SPEAKS: 24 HOURS AFTER "BLACK MONDAY"

CLOSED UATH SPINE UNIT STIRS CONTROVERSY

From daily trust news paper. Published on Tuesday, 22 April 2014 17:58

Written by Judd-Leonard Okafor

Barnabas Ioever, 27, is left helpless after the management of University of Abuja Teaching Hospital, Gwagwalada stopped his scheduled spine surgery and discharged him.

The hospital management has denied discharging him, insisting instead that it referred him for better care, though there is no record of a referral.

Ioever was discharged April 3 after unspecified “discussion” between UATH management and Dr Ahidjo Kawu, consultant orthopaedic and spine surgeon who was managing Ioever, Daily Trust has learnt.

Possible closure of spine programme at UATH had been in the offing but it came to a head when the hospital management instructed “me to discharge a patient who needed surgery urgently,” Dr Kawu tells Daily Trust.

Ioever was admitted in hospital with an injury to his spinal column late February after his company vehicle crashed on a run to deliver soft drinks in Kano.

The second bone in his lower back was fractured, according to an MRI scan he underwent in March.

Its covering as well as nerves at the base of the spinal cord were compressed, including those that normally send and receive messages between the lower limbs and pelvic organs—bladder, rectum and internal genital organs.

UATH chief medical director, Dr Peter Alabi, insisted Ioever “must have been referred.”

“If he was not referred anywhere, we will ask whoever [the] consultant was managing him and find out exactly what must have happened,” he said told Daily Trust in response to questions.

He explained standard practice. “If you know that you cannot effectively manage a patient till the end, don’t delay him or her. It is not abnormal to ask a patient to go to another hospital.”

Ioever wasn’t referred to any other hospital. Since his discharge early April, Ioever “is still at home and seriously in pain,” says his brother and carer Robert Ioever.

“He cannot eat well, because if he should eat, he must defecate, and the process of passing out stool is very, very difficult. He cannot sit up, much less stand up.”

He passes urine through a catheter line inserted into his urethra, just before his surgery was cancelled. Now his family is considering legal action to compel UATH to provide care.

According to Robert, the discharge came first as fault with machinery, then he was told “the CMD has cancelled our operation because they don’t have a doctor that can handle such cases”, and then being told of a standing order that surgeons only carry out spine surgeries “once in two weeks.”

He remembers being confused and his brother tossed from doctors to management until their discharge a week later.

Ioever has become the latest victim of strangled relations at UATH that affected its six-year-old spine surgery programme, which didn’t take off for the first two years after it was created.

Another patient Toyin Ayinla was last to undergo spine surgery before the closure.

His surgery on April 1 was interrupted with threat of stoppage in the wake of decision to implement the closure, sources say.

Ayinla injured his spine in October 2010 after attempting to push a campaign vehicle out of mud using his back.

He underwent management at University of Ilorin Teaching Hospital for over a year but his movement problems remained.

“Even to bathe myself became difficult. But now everything is okay. I bathe myself, I walk, I do everything now,” he told Daily Trust Tuesday morning on his way to a physiotherapy appointment at Unilorin teaching hospital.

The spine unit has garnered media headlines since it went operational four years ago, and sources indicate publicity surrounding it may be reason for its closure and its coming under attack.

“People close to the chief medical director convinced him that the head of the spine unit is trying to position himself to be the new chief medical director,” said Dr Kawu.

UATH was short of instruments required for spine surgeries, forcing a collaboration between the unit and the firm Spine and Scoliosis.

In one collaboration, equipment for cervical surgery, estimated at $236,000—some N50 million—and donated by US-based DePuy Spine Inc to Dr Kawu to operate on indigent patients in Nigeria after he completed a fellowship at the Scoliosis Research Society at the New York Hospital for Joint Diseases were held back by a customs agent in Lagos for nearly a year.

They include 78 implants and 419 instruments donated after a counterpart fee of $500 was paid, Kawu told Customs in a protest letter in July demanding the equipment be released.

On release, the equipment were distributed among six orthopaedic hospitals, including UATH.

Dr Alabi claimed no knowledge of previous use of spine surgery equipment, which was reported widely.

“We didn’t have any link with anybody to bring us any equipment that was seized by Customs. A particular consultant in this hospital was in a deal and I don’t know how he ended up with it,” the chief medical director said.

“It [the seized equipment] does not belong to the hospital. It belongs to whoever had a link with those people. It is not an instrument for the hospital. We were never in the picture. We didn’t have any interface with Customs for any equipment that was imported on our behalf.”

Asked whether referred in particular to Dr Kawu, the hospital’s spine orthopaedic and spine surgeon, he said, “If you want to suggest that, I don’t know.”

The equipment have been used for free surgeries since then. Other payment by patients cover equipment UATH lacks and services such as anaesthesia and theatre use but never the procedures.

They helped knock down cost of a surgery to decompress and stabilise injured spinal bone (as in Ayinla’s case) to around N500,000, compared to N1 to N2.5 million in other hospitals, Dr Kawu estimates.

Ayinla said he paid less than N400,000 to cover equipment for his procedure. Robert has paid more some N470,000 to buy rods and screws for his brother’s surgery, in addition to nearly N100,000 for anaesthesia, orthopaedic implants and theatre at UATH, which the hospital is yet to refund since Barnabas was discharged.

UATH management has since insisted Spine and Scoliosis, which sells implants to patients and supplies instruments, stop its supply, insisting they will acquire their own set.

“What they couldn’t achieve in six years, now they want to in one week. All the patients that required [spine] surgery are being turned back and left to their faith,” said Dr Kawu.

“The bottomline in this saga is ego and greed,” he said.

One source told Daily Trust that among reasons for closing the programme was concern that UATH could lose out on funding if its surgeons continue to use private equipment supplies to cut the cost of surgery on patients.

But Dr Alabi insisted UATH was “not putting any hold on spine surgery.”

“Whatever we doing now, we will continue to do and we can only improve. But we cannot put the lives of patients in danger in [that] what we cannot do and then we go and do it. That is not good practice. We are a teaching hospital and we go for the best.”

Surgery to correct spine deformity in Ummi Salma, 9, currently hospitalized at UATH, is to hold at Nizamiye, which donated its facilities free for seven days.

And Barnabas is still home with his spine injury, waiting and hoping.

Epiphany: Please Take A Look At This Picture

10th April, 2014

Kindly allow me to explain this simple picture.

It looks almost like an ordinary picture nowadays. It perhaps does not strike much in our desensitized minds. Take another look. What do you see?

My brother (late) was once asked by the New York Times to describe his experience as the only consultant treating HIV in a nine-county area of the Mississippi Delta region of America. This was in the early days of the virus when there were few specialists. There was something peculiar he said. Quoting from the New York Times of July 3^rd, 2001; Epidemic Takes Toll on Black Women:

“Dr. Brimah hears from his patients that H.I.V. is often the least of their worries. ”There are issues,” he said, ”of looking after children, trying to get insurance, the lack of a father in the home, alcohol, drugs. They have so much going on.”

I could not understand and relate to how this could be in America; that was until Katrina when the poverty of the Mississippi Delta region was exposed to the world.

Take a look at the picture. What do you see?

The picture shows two boys. Did you notice them? Now look closer at them. One, the one on the left has no shoes. He has no shoes. That little boy is barefoot in the ash of the burned buildings.

I am not sure of the boy on the right, perhaps he is likewise.

Now look at their clothes. They are haggard. In that picture, I see abject poverty. These are not beggars. These are children of Nigeria.

They are walking in the burned debris; looking for something. Perhaps it was their home. Perhaps it was their parents’ house. Perhaps their parents were killed and now they are scouring the burned ashes to see anything they can salvage. Perhaps they are looking for charred objects for memory of their parents lost.

Or perhaps it is not their home, but they are looking all the same for something of value in the debris.

Think about the lives of those boys; think about their hopes. Think about the opportunities they had, the gifts of Nigeria they never partook of or ever hoped to enjoy; and now they have gone from little to none. The homes I have seen in all the burned images, huts, mud buildings with thatched roofs. This has zinc roofs. These houses, are they in Nigeria? I never knew of this poverty. Of the millions in rural areas we have so abandoned.

Look at those boys and imagine what next from here. What did they have before the fire and the death? What will they have after? What did the government do for their area? What did the state government do for that region with the nation’s wealth? What will the government do for them now that all has been lost, perhaps even their parents?

What do we do for them? How do we strive, fight for them to have a better life? Or do we just drive our cars, text on our phones and believe their rights are not our fight, despite God blessing us with knowledge, power, youth, technology and spare time to spend watching Man U and Arsenal European games of men kicking leather balls?

Are we preoccupied with getting cars, perhaps private jets by looting the nation, leaving these boys to such a life?

What did those boys do to merit this treatment with guns and anger from our activities and our generation?

This picture is from Vanguard; I believe from one of the recent episodes of ‘unknown gunmen’ massacres, Zamfara 250 perhaps. The ones in which the culprits never get caught, thanks to our security department being depleted –by the politicians in power—of all resources and not having the modern equipment necessary to counter the crime –the politicians in power arm and create.

This is what our nation is. As though the lack was not enough, the chronic corruption has now caused intractable terror. The politicians have made the youth, the herdsmen, the farmers, wild and now they are killing the poor who gained nothing from Nigeria and partook naught in the plundering of Nigeria. The poor who simply minded their business, who unlike some of us even, did not criticize the government. What is their crime, other than being Nigerians?

In that picture, I see the truth. I see the pain. I see darkness.  I see the crime and the sin. And most painful of all to me, I see my lack of empathy, my cowardice and my ungratefulness and my failure.

We Youth have the power to correct this. We have the numbers to overturn this shame that our nation has become. We have the capacity to easily revolt and stop this madness and fight the wicked.

It is time for our independence from the plundering, wicked Cabal. The over recycled vestiges of colonialism that have remained, dead roots, with no leaves, twigs or fruit to offer, desperately stuck in the corridors of power.

They do not leave, not because they do not want to, but because they are too ashamed to; and in their inner souls they wish to right their wrongs, but they fail to come to terms with the truth that they lack the ability to. They have a sickness, a dangerous sickness.

Form your revolution at your location. Own your revolution. Collaborate. Join the revolution: http://NigerianMassesRevolution.com  We must declare our independence this year. It has been one-year-too-many. A handful of Cabal must no longer hold the millions of us down.

It is the God demanded duty of every nation to provide for its weakest; else God punishes such nations that abandon their most vulnerable with the terror and curse we now experience.

Our great men and women of the past, Mrs. Fumilayo Kuti, Enahoro, were told that it would not work. They were young like us. They were challenged with worse than us. There was no global human rights then, no media, yet they stood up to the colonial masters and demanded freedom, the freedom we got.

Now it is our turn to stand up to the Cabal and demand our second freedom; freedom from their treachery, freedom from their tyranny. All of them must leave the mantle of leadership of this nation.

They have done enough harm. It is time for a new attempt to re-found and re-forge this great land and redirect the course of this great nation and the great nations that make its many parts. Let us declare our second independence this October 1^st.

Nigeria Must Be Free! Nigeria Will Be Free!

#NigerianMassesRevolution  #Our2ndIndependence

Dr. Peregrino Brimah
http://ENDS.ng [Every Nigerian Do Something]
Email: drbrimah@ends.ng Twitter: @EveryNigerian

MUCH ADO ABOUT GDP REBASING

Over the years, successive governments in Nigeria have always bamboozled us with great terminologies such as GDP, per capita and other macroeconomic indices which they have always used as a good scorecard for their stewardship in spite of the terrible spate of misgovernance.

Not minding the obvious abject poverty and hunger, lack of power to do as little as lighting a bulb, the spin doctors of the government still find these economic jargons a justification for their time in office.

The recent pronouncement by the world bank of Nigeria’s economic fortune as judged by the rebased GDP figure has been met with a lot of excitement especially amongst the government quarters; and of course the fact that Nigeria is now the biggest economy in Africa, and number 26th in the world ranking. I have entered into various discussions of the relevance of the recent pronouncement and most people seems to be at best cynical while a few still feels sympathetic to the government.

The cynicism is not unexpected, given the frustration that is rife in our society these days. Is it not enough that the government fail to provide electricity for domestic and business use, also fail to make gasoline available for purchase, yet it becomes inappropriate or sometimes illegal for someone to buy the commodity into Geri cans. It Is as if the government is trying to force us into darkness.  Well that is the subject of another discussion for another day. Now we would try to X-ray what the GDP rebasing is all about and its relevance to our daily life.

According to Investopedia ( financial encyclopedia) GDP is defined as the monetary value of all the finished goods and services produced within a country's borders in a specific time period.  It includes all of private and public consumption, government outlays, investments and exports less imports that occur within a defined territory.

GDP  =   C  + G + I + NX

where:

"C" is equal to all private consumption, or consumer spending, in a nation's economy
"G" is the sum of government spending
"I" is the sum of all the country's businesses spending on capital
"NX" is the nation's total net exports, calculated as total exports minus total imports. (NX = Exports - Imports)

The simple explanation of the above Arithmetic jargon is that GDP sums up all the money exchanging hands in Nigeria due to payment of goods and services. It is expected that as the GDP grows the economy grows and so is the standard of living because another calculation from the GDP is what is called the per capital GDP which is the GDP divided by the population of the country. This however is based on the assumption that the wealth of the country is evenly distributed, but we all know the situation with wealth distribution in Nigeria.

GDP was first developed by Simon Kuznets for a US Congress report in 1934. Kuznets however warned against its use as a measure of welfare.

While the GDP tends to give an impression of growth, it doesn’t clearly tell the whole story. Just looking at the GDP alone tells a part, but other indices are also part of the financial report. The per capital income for instance is a fair idea of the resources available to the citizens because it divides the GDP by the total population of the country. Therefore even though Nigeria has overtaken South Africa in nominal GDP, with a population of 150 million and south Africa with population of 51million one can imagine that the per capital GDP of south Africa is about three times that of Nigeria.

Besides all these the component of the GDP shows that summing up the GPD can definitely not be a good representative of what is happening to the economy. A closer look may reveal a number of things. For instance from the above calculation “G” which represents government spending is a very contentious issue in this country. Year in year out government continue to pass huge budgets without a complementary improvement be it in infrastructure of otherwise.  Adding that figure to GDP is definitely going to be a confounder.

A sector by sector look at the GDP also shows a lot going on or not going on with the economy. For instance,  the manufacturing sector of the economy contributed 6.81 percent to the new GDP data equivalent to N5.47 trillion ($34.8 billion) out of the total 2013 GDP rebased estimate of N80.22 trillion ($510 billion).

In spite of the various strivings by government to boost the manufacturing sector it stills underperforms compared to other countries. World Bank data shows contribution of manufacturing sector to the GDP in Austria is 19 percent, while that of Thailand remains 34 percent. For South Africa, it is 12 percent, while it is 13 percent for Iran.

Crude petroleum and natural gas which comes under the mining and quarrying sector contributed 14.4 percent or N11.55 trillion ($73.56 billion) to the total 2013 rebased GDP. Considering the fact that this sector contributes about 75% of our present earning, it therefore shows untapped potentials due to failure to develop the sector which has largely existed as rent seeking.

In 1962, Kuznets stated “Distinctions must be kept in mind between quantity and quality of growth, between costs and returns, and between the short and long run. Goals for more growth should specify more growth of what and for what“.

It is therefore instructive for the government to wary on the full implication of GDP when indeed the standard of leaving of the general populace cannot be said to have improved.

The same world bank that has given the rebased figure for Nigerian GDP, just last week published a report which showed that Nigeria is one of the poorest countries in the world. While this may seem like double speak,. what it reflects is the reality of what is going on in the country. In spite of the huge spending, the lives of the common Nigerian (now so many) has not being improved. Indeed people seems to be getting poorer.

The reasons for these cannot be far fetched. A country that finds it difficult to pay decent living wage for its civil servants, fails to provide an effective transportation system, fails to provide power to her people, yet goes ahead to increase the price of petrol. We all know where the money goes.

I believe that governance is a social responsibility and the works of the government cannot be measured by how much figures is brandished but how the lives of the people are affected. Other figures that may be of interest are: poverty line in the country, food availability, rate of inflation, infant and maternal mortality. The number of people with access to health care. Number of people with access to electricity or access to portable water. Number of houses per Nigerian, youth unemployment figure. These are figures closer to the people which reflect the true picture of what is going on in the country.

The government needs to embrace these figures and work by it. Nigerians cannot be moved anymore by the cosmetic figures that has little bearing to the lives of the people and usually comes just before some global institutions are trying to lure us into one financial policy or another. The government can no longer pull a wool over our eyes. The reality of the economy must continue to stare at us and evoke necessary response that is capable of delivering us from this quandary. Nigerians are truly in pain.


 

ONE MISSED OPPORTUNITY ATTRACTS ANOTHER

I GOT THIS FROM A FRIENDS WALL:

It was the occasion of Nigerian centenary celebration, and President Jonathan gave an address as part of the programme of events. Many Nigerians were worried about the need to have gone ahead with the celebration giving the reecent massacre of able young minds in Yobe by suspected terrorist group.

Some felt the Nation was to be in mourning and such celebration was in-congruent with our present realities, while others felt stepping it down could have at least meant some regards for the lost of the loved ones. Able young minds they were; leaders of tomorrow.

At any rate, the events went on amidst fireworks and fanfare and this was what my friend had to say.

"With his national broadcast last Wednesday focusing mainly on the centenary celebrations, President Jonathan missed a golden opportunity to assure the citizens of Nigeria of their safety and well being. I could imagine how a President Obama would have started that speech in respect of the same breach of American security: 'On Sunday, we lost 59 students to terrorists who invaded our Unity school to spread their campaign of hate and division. They burnt down the school and leveled it to the ground. On Monday, the same gang of killers invaded a village in Adamawa and shot at everyone and everything in sight. Many of our citizens lost their lives. I have summoned a meeting of my service chiefs and I have instructed that the Army and Air force immediately go after these guys and pursue them to their holes. They shall have no hiding place. We shall unearth them from every hiding hole. It is unfortunate that this is coming at a time we are celebrating our hundred years of nationhood, when our very union is at stake and we are doing everything to cement that unity. It is ironic that these people chose to attack one of the very symbols of our togetherness, a Unity School. I have decided to scale down the centenary celebration. We shall now use the occasion to celebrate our brothers and sisters who lost their lives to these senseless and unwarranted killings. Never again would agents of darkness be allowed to roam our streets with the freedom they refuse to grant others. America will not go to sleep and allow this nonsense to have any impact on any of our citizens. My National Security Adviser has been mandated to report the latest developments to me on an hourly basis. My heart reaches out to these victims and their families. Michelle and I offer our condolences to a grieving nation. We promise to do everything possible to protect innocent kids who are the future of this country. We must all resolve to say Never Again. God bless America! - President Barack Obama"

I was moved with goose bumps when i read this write up. I felt it was a President Obama talking, and i really had no doubt that the character of the write up shows the same. What moved me most was that what it showed that we have Nigerians with this same character that we so much cherish and admire about others. Nigeria is blessed with able young minds with the character and requisite skills to turn the fortune of this country positively. I do not have any doubt about this, but i wonder why we still suffer so much in the midst of plenty. 

YOUTH OF TODAY SONG -MUSICAL YOUTH