‘Most challenges in Africa are the same’

Tell us about the nature of your projects especially the ones commissioned in Nasarawa State?Let me start from the issue of where we do our projects. Maybe I should say it is not only about rural clinics. The clinics happen to be just one of the projects that we do. We do a lot of […]

Tell us about the nature of your projects especially the ones commissioned in Nasarawa State?
Let me start from the issue of where we do our projects. Maybe I should say it is not only about rural clinics. The clinics happen to be just one of the projects that we do. We do a lot of free medical services to rural communities. We do water wells. We do women and youth empowerment projects. We do cleft-clip surgeries for children born with the deformities; we sponsor those kinds of surgeries at no cost to the parents. We only pay for the consumables, admission bed, but the doctor do the surgeries free.
Apart from this, what other programmes do you do?
We have a project for scholarship for orphans but we specify for AIDS orphans. The reason we specify this is that there are millions of orphans but we possible can’t take everybody. So in order to help us streamline where our help goes to we look for children who are AIDS orphans. They are people that are very vulnerable. You found out that their father and mother have died of AIDS and the relationships most times do not care and the best we can do is to make sure they finished at least secondary school. We also do disaster relief as well. We have done quite a number of disaster especially during the religious riots in Kaduna and the Jesse pipeline disaster. We were the first people on ground and recently we were at the flood disaster in Shendam (Plateau State) and visited a camp in Jos for people whose houses were slept away and most of them were Muslims.
Infact the camp we went to are all Muslims and the person who was in-charge was surprised that a Christian organisation would come to bring relief to Muslims and we said to him we are not a Christian organisation set-up to provide for Christians. We are here to provide relief to whoever needs it. Anybody that needs help as long as it is within our power we would do it.
The rural clinics which we are talking about came as an off-shoot of our free medical services and what happened was this. We said to ourselves, every community we go to provide free medical services, usually we do like three days, five days and in some cases we do ten, twelve days clinics. Now every time we go out to do that, on the very last day, we always have to turn people back and I keep saying ‘sorry we have to close’. We cannot keep the clinic open indefinitely and it pains my heart each time we have to turn people back. Secondly, I asked the team, ‘when we go and do a medical mission in any community and we leave, what happens after we leave. Does it means nobody falls sick anymore?’ and the answer was ‘no’ and I say if they fall ill, what happens, they would die because they cannot get access to medical services.
We started a project called the Medics kits. It was more like a big first aid box where you put all the medicines that you would need for simple ailments-headache, cuts-those small things. We said to the communities we would buy these for you but progressively we would reduce the amount of what we provide and progressively they would make up the difference and hope that after one year, they would completely take over the Medics Kit. But of course a first aid kit is limited in what it can do. Also somebody who knows how to use the kit must be available for the kit to be useful and if you have a big first aid kit with everything available and everybody is a farmer and not knowing what to do when somebody have a headache then you have a useless box.
We tried it in a few communities and felt it did not work well. Then we said there has to be a better way to do this. So the team came up with the idea of this rural clinic and we did not start with what is in Angwan Ahmadu today. What we did was to ask the community to give us ten volunteers and our doctors, pharmacists and nurses would come and train them over a period of two weeks basically to handle primary health care.  We trained them enough to be able to recognize simple ailments and to know what to give to provide succour and then we provided them with cell phones so that if they don’t know what to do they can call our doctors and get advice.
But we would put a medicine cupboard which would be placed in house of the chief. But we begin to think where we can keep the medicines throughout the day rather than the Chief’s place. That is where the idea came that if we can convince the villagers to mobilise themselves and build a small room and a community build a small room for themselves and it was a good idea and I told the team that if you can replicate in each of the communities so that we could put the medicines in a neutral.
 But then we do not have the resources to start building. The two clinics at Angwan Ahmadu and Angwan Ayaba cost us over N15million. So what we did was to write proposals to some embassies and one of them was the Japanese embassies and our application was favourably considered. We have to upgrade. We have to get wheelchairs, beds, examination tables. We have to make sure that everybody that goes there would find help. Again it was counterpart funding and not as if the Japanese gave all the money that we needed.
Can you share your experience working for Anglophone countries?
Well, working as the Regional Director having oversight function for West Africa, is that what I have found out is that the same challenges we have in Nigeria are basically the same challenges you find all across the west coast of Africa. It is just that in all other places, it is even more chronic. What I have observed is that the level of poverty is higher in most of this other countries than it is in Nigeria. I know that a lot of Nigerians may not agree. I say to people if you travel within West Africa, when you come back, you would thank God that you are a Nigerian. For example in Liberia, we have built a whole school from the bottom-up. We are in the community to commission a borehole and it turned out that it was raining and looking for somewhere to hide and somebody asked us to run into the local church which turned out to be a school too. The roof of the building was leaking and kids were having classes and I looked at the person with me and said we need to do something about this and he agreed. He came from our head office in the US. We sent a proposal of close to over $50, 000 and it was approved.
Also in Ghana for instance we do a lot of water wells. We do orphans scholarships. We support a lot of children who are orphans. We do a few of soup kitchen. It is a project where we go to a poor area, cook meals and invite people to come and eat. I like it and I don’t like it and I told the Ghana people that we need to do something on a more permanent basis for the people. So, we started to do some humanitarian work in Ghana that has to do with empowerment. We have done a lot of that and free medical work in Sierra Leone as well because we found out that in Sierra Leone there is a general problem of hernia and eye problem too.
What other things are you engaged in?
You know to that CBN is not all about humanitarian. We are primarily a media outfit. We have programmes on Television like the 700 Club, Turning Point, Another Life, You are there, 700 Club Nigeria, Super Book. We have those programmes because we believe television is a typical medium for helping people especially in an environment of despondency, we can preach hope. That is what our programmes do. Preach hope to a people who don’t have hope.
Talking about giving hope and your humanitarian work, have you been able to assist people in the North-East of Nigeria?
I would be honest with you, we have not done anything in the North-East and the reason is simple. I do not want to put the life of any of the staff at risk, because as you know what is happening in the North-East, you cannot predict. You cannot predict when there is going to be a flood, fire or any natural disaster.