19 Apr 2009 |
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Local newspapers in Britain are not so much newsless as full of itsy-bitsy ‘local’ news, often excessively civic-minded, lowbrow and forgettable. In size and sensibility they are usually tabloidal. And since they are mostly given away as freebies, they are even less treasured than national tabloids like The Sun. But I guess I’m being subjective here. You have a feeling that a local newspaper would be a good companion for live-alone OAPs and spinsters of a certain age. Again, its classified ads may be useful to local tradesmen and artisans. And you have a feeling that the local rag may be useful for other purposes: a couple of pages are sometimes taglined Personal, pages which may carry cute, if oracular, adverts of Japanese Escorts, Thai Masseuses, undescribed Matures et cetera. I am one of those who find little to read in tabloids, far less in local tabloids. But away from home one day, the only thing I could pick up to read on a train station bench was a local newspaper. Since I still had about fifteen minutes or so to wait, I browsed longer on the stories in the paper, lingering for a few seconds more than usual on each page, though not a second longer on the Personal page. When I flipped the pages to a story entitled Midwife Jo’s Nigerian Mission, I pitched into it. It needs not be conditioned nor reflexive for me to be interested in stories about Nigeria, more so in a local newspaper which are, as I wrote above, usually introverted. Below are the excerpts of what I read: “A midwife had dubbed herself a ‘mad-wife’ after volunteering to work for a month in Nigeria – which has the second highest maternal death rate in the world. Jo Watts, 42, is set to become the first white midwife to work in the Wish For Africa charity clinics in the country next week. “On May 10 the Hospital midwife will leave her husband and children behind to embark on a month-long trip in Lagos. During her visit she will deliver babies and advise staff at the three WFO clinics in the city. “She said: ‘I am excited and nervous. I have never done anything like this before. Maybe I should be called a ‘mad-wife’, not a midwife. “But the mother-of-three, who only qualified as a midwife in September, added: ‘I know this is going to be difficult, but I think it’s going to be an experience of a lifetime. And if it goes well, I might do it again… My skills are needed out there. There are so many basic tools that we take for granted here that they lack. “Another difficulty Mrs Watts will face is the threat of kidnap, which is a serious problem in the country. Her three children and husband of seven years are putting on brave faces, but are quite worried. Some of her colleagues have also expressed concern about the trip. “She added: ‘I’ll have Femi Olaleye from WFO with me all the time and as long as I have my wits about me, I should be okay. There is mixed feelings, my family are proud of me but obviously that’s mixed up with the realisation that I am going to disappear to a dangerous country for a month. I am sure that my husband is concerned than he lets on. “This is something I have to do, a far cry from what I’ve been doing. This is really putting myself outside the box.” Forget the accents of noblesse oblige in the newspaper report, the British woman is going to Nigeria for a good reason and a good cause. If our health asystem - as in something that has no system to it - is not so appalling that the country is chalked down as having the ‘second highest maternal death rate’ in the world, a British midwife will not be planning an angel-of-mercy journey to Nigeria. We all know the state of our health asystem (pardon the neologism), so there is no point expatiating on it. Except, perhaps, incidentally. I saw a documentary in which an enthusiastic A&E official of LUTH is showing off two ambulances to a British journalist. The apologies that were miscalled ambulances were a couple of Peugeot 504 estate, both of which were obviously scrapyard-fit not only in eyes of the documentary-maker but also in the eyes of most watching the film. The filmmaker had passed a comment about the ambulances being the most clapped-out he had seen anywhere, and pointedly he said something about everything he had seen in Nigeria not befitting of a country rich in oil – the hospital wards he’d been shown and certainly the ambulances. When I decided to put what I read in the local paper out here, I had wanted it to speak for itself without making any comments, hoping to avoid any impassioned editorialising. But I realised how difficult this was. While I am only slightly surprised that Nigeria takes the penultimate position among countries with high maternal deaths, it still comes across in a bad way. Why Nigeria? One can easily count countries within and outside of Africa that one would believe would worst Nigeria in reaching the finishing-line in the backward-running race of maternity deaths and other health-related maladies. What about African countries lately and currently ravaged by war? Maybe one of them had come first - or is it last? - piping Nigeria at the post. Then one cannot but be struck by the trepidation with which the British midwife plans her journey to Nigeria. You can almost touch the frisson. It is like someone making arrangements to journey into what the religious scripture might call a Den of Iniquity, writhing with poisonous serpents and scorpions and presided over by Abaddon. And you wonder: Is it so bad in Nigeria? Is it that awful? Possibly not; probably yes. For instance, if the woman had read about how a policeman had murdered a three-year old girl, and how the killer’s colleagues had proceeded to beat up the dead child’s father almost immediately, then you would forgive her for being so cagey. Particularly if she juxtaposed that with how a policeman in her country was recently suspended for cuffing a rather restive protester during the G20 meeting, when the police obviously had a tough time controlling the swearing, spitting and baying horde of protesters. When Mr Franklyne Ogbunweze asked the very ontological question Is Nigeria the Capital of Hell, he was damned by many, praised by a few. How could a country with a high number of religious, presumably heaven-bound, people be bracketed in the same sentence as hell? The problem a lot of people had with this poser – actually a rhetorical question – is that Ogbunweze reversed Jean Paul Sartre’s ‘Hell is the other People’ into Hell is my country, into hell is not exactly my people but what a few have made of the many in my country. And the scary thing is not that someone, a Nigerian no less, sees Nigeria as hell, but that the country truly evinces all the earmarks of a temporal hell. Nigeria, it’s been proved a lot of times, is an apocalyptic underworld of sorts, where there is really no single Pluto ruling, but a pack of thieving plutocrats. For sophists who may want to use Sartre’s ‘hell is the other people’ to dismiss the midwife’s fears and set them down to the fact that she does not belong in Nigeria and had only sensationalise her fears, the number of those who see Nigeria as home and still think it is a rather disagreeable and unsheltered place to live should give them a bit of pause. I am sure that the British midwife’s chaperon designate (Femi Olaleye) during her stay in Lagos would be reassuring her that nothing untoward is likely to happen to her. And the chaperon wouldn’t have been completely wrong. Because the chances of the nurse returning to England unhurt after her month-long stint in Nigeria are very high. We know that kidnapping is not a national problem in Nigeria. We Nigerians know that Lagos, for all its armed robberies and racket, is not nearly as dangerous as Caracas, Venezuela’s bloodstained capital. But then we also know that Lagos, just like any number of cities anywhere, is fraught with danger, disorder, malodour and infernal traffic jams. All right, it may be easy for me as a Nigerian to make light of the negative stories and images people harbour about Nigeria, especially those who have never been to the place, but then mud sticks. And this is even a matter of parallax, of perception. The mirror I hold up to Nigeria is totally different from the mirror the British midwife holds up to it – and neither mirror is accurate. While mine may be diffracted by a chequered personal experience, hers is patently refracted by the lack of such experience, only drawing on a copybook of unsympathetic Nigeriana. We are both looking at a complex place, using different lenses. But then even if my fears are not as overblown as that of the British midwife, would any Nigerian, in all honesty, describe the country as the modern-day Beulah? I mean Nigerians on the ground, not those on high, not the few living in the clover of corruption, of appropriation and thievery. Cast a clinical and unsentimental look on Nigeria from where you could have a bird’s eye view, you’d discern the sort of ‘hell’ Mr Ogbunweze and others have been adverting to for some time. Take a closer look at everyday life in Nigeria, you’d see the peculiar sociopathologies, the hell-ish conditions of existence, the gravely devalued quality of life. Slowly and steadily the country’s reputation as a place with any sort of humane integrity has been slipping for decades and, as it were, if you wanted to make a list of countries of ill-repute Nigeria would, possibly by default, vie for a pride of place. Let us not blame the British midwife for slipping into a martyr’s armour as she prepares to go to Nigeria, although one wishes she takes a leaf out of the book of her fearless precursor, Mary Slessor, the well-known care-burdened white woman who had gone to pre-Nigeria Calabar more than a century ago to save mothers from being robbed of their twin children by a perversely dense tradition. Even though I may be seen as too optimistic here, I believe the English midwife will not return to England repeating to herself, the phrase: The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
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