The politics of hunger
Forget about Kano being among the states with the highest number of Severe Acute Malnutrition (SAM) cases in the country for a while, let us not talk about the percentage of does dying as a result SAM just for minutes, if you think the cases of malnutrition are only entrenched in our villages you are […]
Forget about Kano being among the states with the highest number of Severe Acute Malnutrition (SAM) cases in the country for a while, let us not talk about the percentage of does dying as a result SAM just for minutes, if you think the cases of malnutrition are only entrenched in our villages you are wrong.
If before now, someone has told me that, they might be a probability of having cases of malnutrition in Gama, Nassarawa local government just few houses from our street I could have doubted him, but not anymore after seeing poverty, hunger and near to death feelings in the eyes of little children.
Some months ago, we were in Takai and Sumaila, in Sumaila local government. There, CMAM centre records not less than 2000 new cases of malnutrition every month apart from over 4.000 existing cases they have.
In Madobi, a local government that produced two terms governor, many parents don’t even know of the existence of anything called Community-Based Management of Acute Malnutrition (CMAM) centre, for those that know they are tired of going there in search of RUTF for their dying kids; hopeless poor parents.
The most shocking finding is, the last time these mothers, whose only fault is being poor, received the Ready-to-Use Therapeutic Food (RUTF) was over 15 months ago. They cried in isolation and waited for the children to die; get pregnant again and wait for the newly born child to show symptoms of malnutrition and die in the same cycle.
If Kano would expand the horizon of possibilities of dealing with this menace, by localising the production of Ready-to-Use Therapeutic Food (RUTF), and also embark on massive campaign on how the people can utilize the food they produce in their farms, that will go a long way in curtailing the problem.
Ismail Auwal Garba <[email protected]