Many Nigerians were happy early this week when a little boy who was crippled during a Boko Haram attack on Chibok three years ago returned to the country on his feet, after three months of medical treatment in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. He had seemed destined for life on a wheelchair after terrorists broke his spinal cord as they ran over him with motorcycles in April 2014, until a non-governmental organisation, Global Initiative for Peace, Love and Care (GIPLC), in conjunction with Dickens Sanomi Foundation, an Abuja-based charity organisation, took up his case and largely sponsored his treatment.
Ali Ahmadu underwent a spinal cord surgery at Zulekha Hospital, Sharjah, in Dubai. The determined six-year old boy began walking one week after the surgery, despite his doctors’ expectation that he would need physiotherapy to learn to walk again at least three weeks after the surgery. Igho Sanomi, Chairman of Dickens Sanomi Foundation and the Taleveras Group, said of Ali’s recovery: “it is about a fighting spirit, a resolute, charming soul and spirit beating all odds to survive and walk again.”
Ali Ahmadu’s positive attitude is a great testimony to the human spirit. When asked what he wanted to be, he replied without hesitation, “a police man.” The little boy showed that he could not be stopped by the handicap inflicted on him by the terrorists. He is a symbol of the hope the nation must nurse for the Northeast, notwithstanding the ongoing devastation and carnage.
Ali Ahmadu’s story also brings to the fore Nigeria’s shameful failure to invest in life-saving medical facilities. If the boy had not been taken to Dubai, he probably would have been condemned to spending the rest of his life in a wheel chair, and he was just three years old when Boko Haram left him paralysed.
It is, indeed, a matter of utmost regret that 57 years after Nigeria’s Independence, a period in which thousands of our leaders have committed trillions of naira to the quest for medical treatment for themselves in countries like India, Egypt, France, the United States, Pakistan, Britain, Dubai and Turkey, Nigeria has not found it fit to build and operate the kind of health facility that restored Ali Ahmadu to his feet. On the contrary, the few rudimentary steps we have taken, the few facilities we managed to build, are now sliding dangerously backwards. Anyone who has been to many of the nation’s teaching hospitals in recent times will agree that they have become a shadow of their former selves. Many of them are in poor shape and they lack the equipment required to perform many critical surgical operations.
The gross under-investment in medical facilities in Nigeria is scandalous and dumbfounding. Government figures indicate that the hospitals are poorly provided for in our national budgets. Even the State House Clinic, Abuja, was said to lack basic equipment such as an x-ray machine and syringes.
Nigeria is, however, fortunate to have a true professional physician, Prof. Isaac Adewole, as Minister of Health. We urge him to work towards a systematic reversal of the country’s poor attitude to medical care, and revamp our hospitals.
We commend all the organisations that contributed to the effort to get Ali Ahmadu out of the wheelchair and back on his feet, especially the GIPLC and the Dickens Sanomi Foundation, which has confirmed its readiness to support and educate the boy. Ali Ahmadu’s fate during the terrorists’ attack on Chibok in 2014 is yet another reason to rev up the battle to end the Boko Haram insurgency. We also enjoin other non-governmental organisations and well meaning Nigerians to do all that they can to intervene and ease the problems of the many Boko Haram victims in the country.
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