“Children are dying. If immediate action is not taken, more lives hang in the balance”
That was Dr. Simba Tirima, country representative of Medicines Sans Frontiers (MSF) speaking July 5 about severe malnutrition in Northern Nigeria.
Yes, I’m still hanging on to malnutrition. It is a matter of keen interest for me. My children are way older than those at risk of malnutrition, stunting and associated infant mortality. But I was brought up to see every child as owned by society. I was part of the generation that was brought up to treat every child as mine. Puppies and other young animals attract my sympathy; how much more babies with their innocent eyes. How can I see them starving to death and look the other way? God forbid!
I was therefore one with Tirima when he raised the cry about babies suffering acute malnutrition in Northern Nigeria. He noted at that point that it wasn’t yet July when MSF gets the highest number of the tiny patients, yet it’s figures had doubled comparative to 2023. July has come and passed. Your guess is as.good as mine how it went for those tiny feet. Of course, new harvest in August has meant little for Nigerians this year, as soaring inflation sweeps everything along. How tragic!
So, how did we get here? Just two moves by the Bola Tinubu government brought the nation and its people crawling on their stomachs. The petrol subsidy which he scrapped while being inaugurated, and the foreign exchange reforms. The removal of subsidy saw the price of petrol soaring from under N200 per litre to about N1,500 per litre at the pumps right now.
The foreign exchange reforms simply sought to unify the official and unofficial exchange rates, and cut off the central bank defence of the naira. The result was that the exchange rate of the naira crumbled from about N600 to the dollar to about N1,650 presently.
These twin factors have triggered massive inflation at a level unprecedented since the return to civil rule in 1999.
While the children are dying of hunger, the World Bank which is the author of this policy which deliberately eschews a fancy name, is urging Nigeria not to look back from the twin policies. According to the World Bank, looking back is no alternative, and if Nigeria keeps at it, there would be results in about 15 years! That’s what the World Bank’s recent Nigeria Development Report which it titles Staying the Course recommends.
It is estimated that some 11 million Nigerian children are stunted, insufficiently grown for their age. Of these children, some one million are differing severe acute malnutrition (SAM) per annum. That was the picture in 2022. Even if the figure remains same for 2023, it would have doubled between then and now as the MSF report indicates. In the do-nothing scenario that Nigeria currently displays, anything could happen to these two million children.
To policymakers, two million dead children in disparate places may not mean much, after all, Nigeria is not like Germany whose population is thinning down. But unwittingly, Nigeria is losing at this time, about the number of children that the Biafran side lost during the civil war. Isn’t that terrible?
And for those who feel that the battalions of nubile young Nigerian women can practically cork their waists and shoot out more babies than that, there is another terrible piece of statistics.
The United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF) says that one half of pregnant women in Nigeria suffer from anemia which increases risks of premature birth, low birth weights and maternal deaths!
Stunting among children goes beyond physical robustness and includes cognitive maldevelopment. These maldeveloped children are guaranteed to be headaches to the nation in future. They’ll form the foot soldiers of tomorrow’s insurgency, swallowing whatever stupid propaganda their more intelligent peers will not consider.
On another side, the World Bank shows it’s not an outright monster. Indeed, it has consideration for the nutritional needs of children. The Bank’s Investment Framework Framework for Nutrition published this month, is a reassuring work that it’s not peopled by soulless individuals for whom people are mere statistics.
The report, among other things, says that a do-nothing scenario costs the world about $4.2 trillion per annum, but that for every dollar investment in scaling up nutrition, the returns will be some $23. The key interventions in scaling up nutrition include improving maternal and child healthcare, fortifying staple foods, and promoting breast feeding. These interventions would cost some $17 per child and $13 per pregnant woman per annum.
So, is the World Bank chasing with the hounds and running with the deer? It all depends on the beholder, depending on the surrounding factors. While the development report is specific to Nigeria, the Investment Framework for Nutrition is universal.To the beholder who is beholden to the World Bank, like Nigeria, the bank’s words are orders. Without obeying them, Nigeria cannot get its clean bill of health which it requires for international credit.
The question for the government to answer is whether Nigeria needs international credit so badly as to sacrifice her babies and their mothers. As is taught in introductory political science, national interest is basically the interest of its ruling class. So, if the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) wants international credit, Nigeria wants it. And so it is now, which leaves us, our babies and nursing mothers beholden to the World Bank.
For determined minds, however, the needs of this vulnerable population can be reasonably taken care of without offending the almighty bank.
The Ministry of Humanitarian Affairs which had been sleaze headquarters, can actually be put to use, if the government can find a conscientious fellow with a technical mind. Recall that fertilizer distribution was the ultimate sleeze, until Dr Adewunmi Adesina came in as agriculture minister. He deployed information technology to outwit the horde of politicians who had made the task impossible till then. Someone innovative can do something similar to reach the babies and their poor mothers.
Thankfully, the cost isn’t prohibitive.
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OJUKWU-ENENDU first published this article in Observer of Thursday (last week), October 25.
