By Faith Uchara
As the Administrative Headquarters of Nigeria, Abuja has become a city where many citizens from all tribes reside. A lot of people flock into the city daily in search of opportunities for a better living, resulting to the city’s growing population on a regular basis.
As the city receives more people, the struggle for access to the available amenities–which are inadequate for the teeming population becomes a competition between the strong and the weak. Then the age-long cliché of the survival of the fittest and the elimination of the weak becomes the city order.
Health is the most vital area of human life, but in Abuja, the attention given to it has been below expectation. One cannot say, that Dr. Ramatu Tijjani Aliyu, the Minister For FCT, is not working, but, be it far that one applauds an individual who is working below average in an area where he is supposed to work extra time–because it is one area that is most relevant to economic growth, because, as they say, health is wealth.
that, this is not to say that there are no health facilities in Abuja, but these facilities are not enough. More alarming is the fact that the personnel assigned to oversee the general running of the available facilities are mostly, inefficient. And when the populace cry out for help, those in authority provide only lips service-solutions, living the people to their own fate.
Mpape, rather than enjoy all the basic amenities and infrastructure due to its proximity to the seat of power, is instead a community known for its lack of infrastructure and a population housed by shanties built on a landscape dominated by rocks. It has a Primary Health Care Centre where people visit daily to give attention to various health challenges, but because of the discouraging service delivery there, owing largely to the limited infrastructure, people, especially the ones who can afford it, often choose to visit private healthcare facilities in the area, while the poor who can’t, are either left to die of treatable illnesses, or hope on God for supernatural healing.
During a radio show targeted at bringing to light, on Liberty Radio, Jabi, the infrastructural deficit in areas occupied by the poor in prominent cities in Nigeria dominated the conversation. And it was no surprising that the case of Mpape Healthcare Centre was discussed. Two residents of Mpape community who phoned in during the programme described the state of the community’s health centre as pathetic. The problems of the health facility, they said, range from the lack of necessary equipment for treatment of illnesses, lack of, or sufficient qualified personnel, as well as attention.
The callers went further to state that most of the citizens in Mpape had at one time or the other called on the federal government to come to their rescue, but the government, they said, only gave lip solutions, with no hope for a tangible one. One of the callers concluded by imploring The Talk Abuja Initiative –a non-governmental organization to, on behalf of the people of the community, plead the government, and especially the Minister For FCT, to come to the rescue of Mpape residence in tackling the huge infrastructural differences between the community and others, especially in the area of health care provision.
