24 Hospitals in Zamfara, But Only 22 Doctors Attending To Huge Population Of Over Two Million People In The State

Alhaji Abdulaziz Yari, the governor, said outbreak of diseases is clearly a punishment signal from God for the sins of the people. Sanusi immediately took him headlong, declaring that the statement is “horrendous” and “Islamically incorrect”. He then added the clincher: 90% of the problems around the north are self-inflicted and can be solved.

I will illustrate his point. There are 24 state hospitals in Zamfara, but there are only 22 doctors in those hospitals attending to “our huge population” of two million people. You will notice that this has nothing to do with fornication. A governor who cares so much about the wellbeing of the people he was elected to lead would not go and sit down in Abuja while they are being ruined by preventable diseases. I reckon that the first case of meningitis was recorded in Zamfara in November 2016. The state neither handled it nor alerted the federal authorities until February 2017 when it had gone out of hand. To quote Sanusi, this is self-inflicted and can be solved.

In Sokoto, the state government regularly pays health surveillance officers to go round, incognito, and find out if there are threats of disease outbreaks in order to act promptly. Money was collected but job was not done. Meningitis broke out and killed poor people. Technically, who fornicated in this instance? The looters or the hapless people? Conversely, Kaduna state was able to contain and tackle the meningitis outbreak and thus recorded minimal casualty. It has a fairly responsive system, and kudos must go to the governor, Mallam Nasir el-Rufai. But don’t they also fornicate in Kaduna? The Kaduna story, unfortunately, is an outlier.

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