LAGOS – Standing just a few hundred metres from
the Lagos hospital where a Liberian man died of Ebola, John Ejiofor pleaded for
the world to help contain a spread of the virus raging across west Africa.
“Nigeria is in a serious mess,” the 40-year-old
electrical engineer said. “We lack the capacity to deal with the situation.”
Residents of Lagos, sub-Saharan Africa’s largest
city with more than 20 million people, returned to work Wednesday after a
four-day break to mark the end of Islam’s holy month of Ramadan, a public
holiday across the country, even in the majority Christian south.
It was the first workday morning in the bustling
mega-city since authorities confirmed that the worst-ever Ebola epidemic —
which has killed more than 670 people since March in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra
Leone — had reached Nigerian soil.
Medics in full gear to
avoid contracting the virus.
Patrick Sawyer, an employee of the Liberian
finance ministry, is thought to have contracted the virus from his sister
before travelling to Nigeria for a regional conference.
The 40-year-old died in quarantine Friday at a
hospital next to the Obalende market, where Ejiofor sat in his car on Wednesday,
voicing concern over Nigeria’s response to the outbreak.
“If there is an Ebola epidemic in Nigeria today,
our health authorities will be too overwhelmed… The government has to work with
the World Health Organization (WHO),” to stop the virus from spreading, he
said.
Elizabeth Akinlabi, a 30-year-old schoolteacher
milling around Obalende, agreed, saying that days after the Ebola death was
confirmed, the government’s response remained lacklustre.
“A lot of people still do not know about the
existence of the disease, not to talk of taking measures to prevent it,” she
told AFP, urging the WHO “to come to the aid of Nigeria”.
- Hospitals ‘not prepared’ -
Calls for outside help are not common in Nigeria,
Africa’s most populous country, which has a very low foreign aid reliance
thanks to massive earnings from its oil industry, which produces roughly two
million barrels of crude per day.
But in the economic capital Lagos and other
cities, people have little reason to trust the public healthcare system,
especially in the face of a potential crisis.
Many public hospitals are acutely understaffed
and ill-equiped. Some do not have generators, a must in a country with multiple
power cuts each day.
Compounding the current problem is a strike over
pay launched on July 1 by all doctors employed at public hospitals.
A crisis meeting by the striking Nigerian Medical
Association held at the weekend in light of the Ebola outbreak failed to end
the work stoppage.
Most Lagosians pay out of pocket for private
healthcare at clinics ranging from the enormously expensive — staffed by
doctors with degrees from prestigious Western medical schools — to cheap,
ramshackle clinics run by nurses with questionable credentials.
The special advisor on health for the Lagos State
government, Yewande Adeshina, acknowledged how lucky it was that Sawyer was
taken to First Consultants, a professionally-run private clinic in the upmarket
Ikoyi neighbourhood.
“I’m grateful to God that was the hospital he
went to,” she told the private Channels television station. “Because I’m not
sure that a lot of our hospitals were truly prepared.”
- ‘Worrisome response’ -
Nigerian officials have sought to limit panic
since announcing Sawyer’s death, but mixed messages from the federal health
ministry and Lagos state officials have caused confusion among the media and
public.
Health Minister Onyebuchi Chukwu had to retract a
statement claiming the Liberian arrived on July 22, after Lagos authorities
said he landed on July 20.
Chukwu had insisted that Sawyer was brought
directly from the airport to a hospital, leaving him “no time to mingle in
Lagos” and infect others, but the accuracy of that statement has been
questioned amid the dispute over timelines.
The minister further claimed that Nigeria had
contacted and was monitoring all passengers on the ASKY airlines flight that
originated in Togo’s capital Lome and brought Sawyer to Lagos.
Abdullahi Nasidi of Nigeria’s Centre for Disease
Control later indicated that only a handful of the passengers had been found so
far.
For Francis Atufe, a 36-year-old banker and
father of two, the government’s apparent struggle to manage the situation was
“worrisome,” and, like others in the Obalende market, he voiced hope that
foreign experts would deploy across Lagos in numbers.
“I appeal to the WHO to come,” he said. Culled
from Vanguard Nigeria