Posted by By Mike Awoyinfa on
'I am neither a doctor nor a surgeon, but because of the wealth of my experience as a nurse, I am able to perform surgical procedures."
'I am neither a doctor nor a surgeon, but because of the wealth of my experience as a nurse, I am able to perform surgical procedures."
With these frightful words, a man reportedly led a pregnant woman to the gallows of her operational theatre. And there ended her life. Her life and that of the unborn baby. He was carrying out a Caesarian on her. But it all ended in tragedy. Double tragedy.
My heart bled once again as I read what looked like an all-too familiar story: this recurring nightmare of untrained 'doctors", quacks who dress themselves in the white borrowed robes of doctors and go to the theatre to experiment, to toy with precious human lives.
According to the Daily Sun of July 19, a 44-year-old nurse, Mrs. Kemi Afolabi, a poor pregnant mother-to-be, rushed to one Samson Adeleke's Covenant-Love Nursing Home, one of the so many unregistered hospitals and 'healing homes" in Nigeria that have turned out to be the graveyards of many an innocent soul.
Here, the pregnant woman on a mission to give birth to life, ended up having a covenant with death. Just like the name of the place where she died in agony, spilling volumes of blood: Covenant-Love Nursing Home.
This is another chapter in the sad saga of a country where life is so cheap that it can be wasted at any time, at any place, by anybody. If the police are not wasting your life senselessly, it is the armed robber or the hired killer doing it.
If it is not the adulterated drug seller killing you, it is the untrained doctor posing as a qualified doctor and giving you death in overdose.
Yesterday was exactly one year, when our beloved sister and friend Mrs. Rosemary Anyanwu similarly died in the hands of a death doctor on July 22, 2004.
Now how is a helpless patient going to know whether a doctor is trained or untrained? How is a churchgoer going to know whether his pastor is genuine or fake?
Nigeria is a two-in-one country. A country of the fake and the genuine. If you are buying motor spare parts or buying anything for that matter, you are asked: Do you want the genuine one or the fake?
If it is not a fake army officer, parading in borrowed uniform, it is a fake journalist duping people in the name of a genuine one. If it is not a fake pastor taking advantage of the weak, it is probably a fake currency dealer selling you fake dollars.
In Nigeria, fakery and quackery and duping have been carried sky high to the bounds of international notoriety. Every day somebody is trying to do you in with one bogus ‘419' proposal or the other. On Internet, on phone, in the bus, everywhere, somebody is out to rip you off. If only they would just rip you off financially and not rip you of your life, then you can live to fight another day. But how do you escape from the pangs of a doctor blindly wheeling you to the theatre to die? A doctor whose only knowledge of surgery is through watching others do it at the theatre.
You can learn to be a barber by watching. You can learn to cook by watching. Some kids can even learn to drive by watching their daddy drive. But how do you learn to be a doctor by just watching doctors perform surgery? Absurdity! Nigeria is an absurdity!
Oh, she was such a jolly good fellow. Those who knew Mrs. Anyanwu would remember her as a woman strong as the palm tree. A woman who was the pillar on which many leaned. But then even pillars do fall. A year ago, this pillar fell on a very poignant note.
She had an early morning headache, something that looked routine and ordinary. Something that could have been simply managed in a good hospital. But the woman helplessly found herself in one of the 'homes" manned by impostors playing the doctor. And in less than 12 hours, the woman, strong and tall like the cider of Lebanon, was no more. Dead. Irreversibly dead. Gone forever. Extinguished like a candle in the wind. Evil wind.
My heart goes out to the like of Mrs. Kemi Afolabi and her unborn baby. My heart goes out to her poor husband. I pray for a Nigeria where the health of her citizens would be the ultimate concern of its leaders.
Now, the poor woman is dead and everything else is medicine after death. Whether you arrest the 'doctor" and keep him in police cell till eternity or whatever, it would not bring back the dead. Instead, the 'doctor" would come out of his 'trouble" after everything and everybody have been settled, to start his life again as a doctor of death.
Such is the story of Nigeria today - the Nigerian tragedy. A country that has no value for life. A country that has no value for anything.
Now, you wonder: Why can't there be another strong NAFDAC woman pouncing on all these illegal hospitals, locking them up and throwing the keys into the Lagos lagoon or the River Niger?
Sleep on, wonderful woman, generous to orphans. We all miss your fun and love of life. We have all learnt lessons from your death.