NIGERIA: World’s champion in malaria deaths
CONTRA-INDICATIONS BY Steve Osuji
All the indices are frightening. No, let’s say all the indices are frighteningly negative. From budgeting to fund deployment, primary healthcare, health delivery, personnel facilities, training, management of communicable and noncommunicable diseases, research, name it. Hardly a good report from any quarter. The plain truth is that Nigeria’s healthcare sector in its current state is at best, comatose, if not in the doldrums. But more troubling is that the managers seem not to have the capacity to reform the system or drive any significant change. And we must not forget the ever present national canker, corruption.
The issue is of such elephantine proportions that no single article can do justice to it, so let’s illustrate with a few examples and incidents.
Steve Osuji
A recent World Health Organisation (WHO) report states that Nigeria recorded the highest malaria deaths globally in 2020. Out of a total figure of 627,000 globally, Nigeria accounted for 31.9 per cent (approximately 200,000). Considering the figures already recorded this year in some northwest states, we are likely to have higher malaria deaths in 2021. To further illustrate Nigeria’s prostrate position, the second most afflicted country in the world is the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and it comes a distant second with mere 13.2 per cent.
The first point to note here is that Nigeria has lapsed into the category of DRC: crisis-ridden, endemic graft, acutely impoverished population and very weak governance structures. Other African countries queuing behind Nigeria and DRC on this ignoble list are Uganda, Mozambique, Angola and Burkina Faso. They account for more than half of global malaria deaths in 2020.
One would expect that a dire figure as this would jolt Nigeria’s leadership into an emergency mode of sort. One would wager that Nigeria set up a Presidential Task Force on COVID19 last year only because it is in vogue; it is on the global front burner and it is a conduit for huge local and global funding. It’s always about the funds! But a thinking country would also have set up side by side, a taskforce against malaria resurgence in Nigeria.
There would have been a certain urgency to kick-in even basic activities like increased awareness programmes, improving environmental sanitation in malaria prone states, availability and subsidization of malaria drugs and ad-hoc special treatment centres for malaria among other quick measures. But nothing. Nobody paid attention to the rising malaria deaths.
It was COVID19 all the way, everyday, every night with so much scaremongering figures and information. Yet in all of those exertions over COVID19, Nigeria reportedly recorded about 2200 deaths in 2020 against 20,000 from malaria. Even as you read this, no serious efforts and structure have been put in place to ensure that 2021 report from the WHO would be positive. Not even coordinated radio jingles to re-teach the people about malaria prevention and management. Not from the federal, nor state, nor the local governments.
It speaks ill of us that an ailment that has been mastered by man over a century ago still ravages our country today. We are today, world’s champion in malaria deaths yet not a whimper from our government about this most troubling report.