. Waru and Yimitu are rural communities in the Federal Capital Territory, Abuja still living in the past. Lacking almost all social amenities, most important of which is health facility, many of the residents are forced to embrace traditional health care practices. VICTOR OKEKE visited the communities and writes on this development.

 

Nigerians in the rural areas generally have less or no access to modern healthcare compared to those in the urban centres. Fewer medical practitioners and ill-equipped healthcare facilities in these areas often mean less preventive care and longer response time in emergency cases.

 

The lack of healthcare workers has resulted in unconventional ways of delivering healthcare to rural dwellers as seen when unskilled traditional birth attendants take over child delivery and other forms of medicare.

 

At a 2001 African Union (AU) meeting in Abuja, African countries agreed to allocate 15 percent of their budgets to healthcare. To date, only six countries (Botswana, Burkina Faso, Malawi, Niger, Rwanda and Zambia) have met this commitment. Health experts now believe that to arrest Nigeria’s worsening health indicators, it is time to shift the focus to rural communities and the poor populace who otherwise may not have the financial weight of a rapidly changing health sector.

 

For example, in Waru, a rural settlement about one hour drive from Abuja city centre in the Federal Capital Territory, there is a primary health care centre which serves no useful purpose to the community because it is not equipped. So, the people generally abandon the magnificent clinic for their ‘reliable’ traditional health care practices.

 

LEADERSHIP was recently at the clinic as part of activities by the Development Communications Network under its ‘NOTAGAIN’ campaign project supported by the MacArthur Foundation aimed at demanding maternal health accountability in some select states in the country, namely Lagos, Jigawa, Kaduna and the FCT.

 

A staff of the clinic who craved anonymity told our correspondent who asked why the place appeared deserted that “some of the women prefer staying at home to give birth than coming to the clinic but after delivery, they will come to the clinic for more medical attention.”

 

He added: “We are family planning service provider, but we don’t have the commodities to offer these services to the women. The major and the greatest challenge we have in this facility is water. We have to buy water from the water vendors and that has been challenging. We may have delivery at night and if eventually we don’t have water, it compounds our problem. As big as this place is, there is no borehole water.”

 

A few kilometres away from Waru is Yimitu, another rural community virtually lacking in all basic social amenities. There is no healthcare facility to turn to in cases of emergency. The nearest facility to the community is the one in Waru or Kabusa. Expectedly, the people firmly embrace their traditional mode of healthcare services.

 

To underscore the danger of not having a functional healthcare facility, a resident, Mrs Rehila Danjuma (42) who has 6 children said she went into the labour of her last child close to mid-night when there was nobody around to assist her. It was Christmas eve in the predominantly Christian community and nobody was around to take her to the clinic at Waru as all her immediate neighbours had travelled for the holidays.

 

“I delivered this baby (pointing to the last child) all by myself. The villagers, the old women and the elders know about this. I gave birth to him around mid-night of December 24 alone at home because my husband was on duty at his work place that night. He works as a security guard at Hot FM near Apo Legislative Quarters in Abuja here. That night, I was home alone around mid-night when I went into labour and I couldn’t move or crawl again. So, I was forced to become my own birth attendant,” she further said.

 

She said in the morning after delivery, her distant neighbours who heard the cry of her baby and saw what happened went and called a nurse from a private clinic in Waru who came and administered injections on her. “By this time, I had finished with the child delivery process, washed and dressed my baby,” the brave woman added.

 

Danjuma further explained that “as soon as I sensed that I was going into labour, I rushed for a nearby black sewing thread and razor blade. And luckily for me, I was close to a table. It was this table that I held on to push my baby out.”

 

She narrated how by divine providence, the baby came out of the womb and safely landed on the wrapper she had placed on the ground but the placenta couldn’t disentangle. “Then I used my hand to press it hard before it disconnected. I tied the navel with the sewing thread I had kept close before the umbilical cord,” she further said.

 

Before her marriage, she disclosed her mother had taught her the process of self-delivery reminding her that it was very important she mastered it because “no one knows tomorrow”.

 

“My mother told me the measurement from the navel to the placenta where I could cut the cord from. After I delivered, I put the placenta inside a waterproof bag and kept it until my husband returned from work and buried it,” she added.

 

Just as many researches have shown, healthcare needs of individuals living in rural areas are different from those in urban areas, and rural areas often suffer from a lack of access to healthcare. Without doubt, the establishment of a primary healthcare centre in a place like Yimitu will turn the tide of development in such a community that had just lost two under-five children the night before Leadership’s visit.

 

Madam Baraba Danjuma (61), one of the traditional birth attendants in Yimitua talked about how busy she is with helping women to deliver their babies, a service which she renders free of charge, she said.

 

Her job, according to her, involves massaging and petting pregnant women when they go into labour so they could bear the pain and deliver safely.

 

“Once the baby is about to come out, I will get a cloth material, razor blade and hot water and put them nearby. As soon as the baby comes out, I will tie the placenta into a knot, bathe and get it dressed. We also use the hot water to press the mother’s belly and the child’s navel,” she said.

 

She referred to a herbal therapy called ‘gwogwologwi’ which is used to arrest bleeding in case of complications after delivery and which she said would come in handy whenever the need for its use arose.

 

She recalled how her mother handed over to her the tradition of child delivery which she also has passed on to her own daughters and wished that the practice never dies with modernity.

 

Rehila Danjuma said most of the women in the community prefer staying at home to deliver with the help of older women because they just couldn’t afford hospital fees and the difficulty of going to a far distance to seek help. She spoke about the dependability of traditional birth attendants, insisting “except in rare cases, there have never been cases of women dying as a result of pregnancy.”

 

She said “only two women in Waru died of pregnancy. One of them is from my town in Kaduna and she died during her first pregnancy. She only complained of fever and neck pain before she died.”

 

And before she died, Danjuma said the woman was taken to the Asokoro District Hospital where the authorities told her there was no bed space to admit her. She was referred to the Abuja University Teaching Hospital, Gwagwalada where she eventually died before she could be admitted.

 

“The other person, a Gwari woman gave birth to her first baby through caesarean section but got pregnant a second time within the next one year. It was the complications that arose from the pregnancy that killed her,” she further said.

 

Danjuma who has become more or less an opinion leader in Yimitu community has been involved in counselling women on the need to adopt family planning and avoid risky traditional practices that endanger lives.

 

“If we should get a hospital here in Yimitu, it will help us very well. All the fever, typhoid and the sick children will easily and quickly be attended to.

 

“We are just returning from the burial of one of my neighbour’s three year old child who had severe fever yesterday but due to the heavy rain that fell, we couldn’t take the baby to the hospital at Kabusa early enough. Before we got there, the baby had died. If we had a hospital in this village, the baby would have been rushed there and probably he would have not died,” she added.

 

Souce: Leadership