As one who has
seen the temporal nature of life in the course of my journey through medical
school; one who has witnessed the sleight dexterity of mortality’s strong
hands; one who has heard muted breaths, seen eyes wide shut and experienced the
tumultuous outpouring of grief, I stared at the computer screen and thought
long and hard about this title, Why do we die? Yes, why do people die? It might
seem like a question oozing from the pores of an existentialist thinker. My
numb mind tried to find an answer. Or maybe answers. But my mind was tabula
rasa, like a bare whiteboard. Suddenly, then I realized that there isn't any one
answer. Again, maybe the answer isn't direct like when a patient dies and the
family asks, “why did he die doctor”? or “why did we lose him”? The answer
isn't that his heart stopped or that the cancer spread to his brain. The answer
sometimes is a story, a story I wish wasn't real.
I would start
from the fact that we are born as Nigerians, the largest concentration of black
people in the world. A
land of promise, one stuffed with abundant resources from above and underneath
the hard earth. I love my country but I guess it’s a story for another day. We
don't choose our families and they don't choose us. If you are lucky to be born
to an educated, middle class (and above) family then your story may be slightly
different.
If not, your tale may begin from day one!
'Poverty is a
carcinogen', I didn't come up with that myself (though I wish I had). It’s a
statement that has been in my head since I heard it for the first time in a
lecture on cervical cancer. Talking about cancer, it’s become a silent killer
in the land today. However, I'd like to rephrase that aphorism - poverty is not
just a carcinogen, it’s a pathogen, a cankerworm, a thief and a murderer! It’s
one of the reasons my people die. Poverty might have become the number one
cause of death among many Nigerians.
I say this because I've seen it
first hand, poverty and her younger sister, Ignorance.
We lash out at the unemployed mother who brought her child to the emergency
room after stooling and vomiting for three days. We tell her that her child is
gone and somewhere amidst the chaos that ensued you wonder whether she had ever
heard of the life saving salt sugar solution. We wonder if she knew that it was
her lack of knowledge, her insidious expression of ignorance that killed the
child. And then, you caution yourself. You also follow up with a pertinent
question - Is it her fault that she
is poor? Her only crime being that she felt government hospitals were a last
resort and believed so strongly in Mama Bola’s remedy for diarrhea. After all,
Mama Bola had some bragging rights. She has had seven children. Before you can
mourn the dead, they bring in another child who didn't cry at birth. This is
her third day of life. You begin to wonder where she was born. If they knew
that a child's cry was indeed her first breath of life. Then you remember it’s
an answer you know all too well. She was born in a traditional birth attendant home.
Well, kindly try to fill in the gaps.
The parents look agitated but you caution yourself not judge them...
'Time of death - 9.42 pm'.
And yet they cry and wail, “death stole our children”! “Death is wicked”.
Those who scale through their childhood years have ready made health problems especially
for adults; hypertension, diabetes, cancer etc. A sad trend is that when people
begin to seek healthcare, the time has already ticked and its countdown to
doomsday. For the single mother who
sells at Yaba, she just had to ignore the breast lump. After all it wasn't
painful. “Na just one small thing. E no matter”, she mutters to herself. If she
wanted to go to the health center she had to sell off all her tomatoes from the
day before, no one would buy stale ones. She had to find somewhere to keep ‘Bom
boy'. She doesn’t trust her co-tenants with her pot of soup, let alone her only
son. The lump would have to wait, but in waiting it grew, until the smell from
the ulcer it had created warded off customers. By that time, she was told it
was too late. Why then did Mama Bom Boy Die?
Ahhh, for the danger of telling a
single story, Chimamanda
Ngozie Adichie warns. The danger of presenting a single narrative that obscures
the complexities of the system. Painting a Nigeria where poverty is everyone's
friend and sickness and disease are close relatives. This scenario won’t be a
fair portrayal. There are poor people in Nigeria but there are also poor people
anywhere else in the world. The diseases of the rich are here as well, indeed
the rich also cry and sadly, they also die. Cancer, Heart diseases ,Hypertension,
Road traffic accidents kill, sometimes they don't even look at socio-economic
class before they attack.
So then why do Nigerians die? The
more I try to answer the question, the more questions keep pouring in like
pop-up windows on an internet explorer. They come in torrents - why do we lack
knowledge? Why is the average life expectancy about fifty years? Why are there
so many people living on less than a dollar a day? Why is there an economic
gulf and social dichotomy between the North and the South? Why are there so few
doctors compared to the large and teeming population? Who is brain drain and
why is it swallowing all our healthcare professionals?
I believe we can all have a better
chance at living, rich or poor, if good governance meant good governance. Would
it not be nice, if free education was at an acceptable standard, available and compulsory
for all? What if there were more industries ready to employ our youth. What if
good health care is affordable, available, and accessible for all? Imagine that
we were enlightened to seek care and do so early. Can you picture in your
mind’s eye that the transportation network were upgraded all around the country
not just in Lagos, Port Harcourt, Benin or Abuja.
Death and life unite us, rich or poor. Perhaps, this Latin dictum would serve
us all too well; Vivere disce, cogita mori - Learn to live; Remember
death. And in remembrance of death, the question still craves for an answer -
why do Nigerians die?
Written By : Dr Bibobrah Emretane
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