In June 2010, while the World Cup hosted by South Africa was on, I left for Zamfara State to chronicle report on the lead poisoning death incident in the state.
Over 400 people in the state and most of them were kids died although the casualty figure always varied. The Commissioner for Health then told me that the kids were mostly affected because their body mass index was too tiny to bear with the poisonous load in their system.
During my trip to Anka and Bukkuyum Local Government Areas, I visited a number of inaccessible villages and hamlets. Those were the death fields of Zamfara. It was so heartbreaking following my tour guide to a space of land with a litter of tiny oval mounds. They were not farm tills for cropping. Those were rather the imprints of the seeds of lost human lives sowed in tears never to germinate. There were the graves of kids who died of lead poisoning.
In Anka LGA, just at a road that Tees off the Council headquarters, I headed down the valleys into the woods to Abare, Yargalma and was told that reaching Tunga Daji would be death wish as hoodlums constantly raided the straight attacking traders who took their wares to the local farm produce markets.
At Dareta I witnessed the real story of heartbreak where the death seemed most concentrated. There, a German NGO was at work digging out the top soil of the entire village, even the surfaces of the floors of their round hut homes and laying them over with fresh and uncontaminated earth moved from another location.
As they scraped off the top soil of Dareta, which I witnessed for hours, they sent the lethal earth harvest into deep pits dug away from the settlement. After each pit is filled to brim, they cover it with good earth also harvested from another location.
The reason for all the task was that the heavy lead load had terribly poisoned and contaminated the whole surface of Dareta as it had done in Abare, Tunga Daji and Yargalma because the villages and people have lived on mining gold the traditional way for ages.
As they pluck off the gold bars coated with impurities from the seams, they take them to the processing mill – their wooden mortar and pestle and pound them thoroughly until the detritus coating is off and the pure gold is separated. The proceeds, which most times are far less than the labour and time put into them, are what the people live on. And over time, they have accumulated so much of the poison to weigh them down to death.
I did my report consistent with what I observed and it was indicting on the government of Zamfara State that allowed the citizens live in such squalor. It is a minus for the governments of Nigeria that reduce the people to quasi humans while they cruise in loots all over the world.
The entire ravaged area had no health facility of any kind, reason the victims and patients were taken to the Bukkuyum General Hospital, over 25km away that I also visited to see the survivors taken care of. The only dividend of democracy those people knew as I witnessed was the graffiti of the then Governor Mahmud Shinkafi that decorated every hut on the Kadauri-Anka-Bukkyum-Zuru road.
The entire area had no health facilities, no schools, no recreation centres, no roads and never think of electricity. At that time of the year when the area was still dry, those villages I visited were not accessible because they had no roads. We went there on motorbike where possible and walked the rest of the distance with my chartered cab driver, Usama, who I engaged in Gusau. These people live in another world away from the Nigeria you know, and early that morning as we veered off the Gusau-Sokoto road at Kadauri towards Anka, all I saw was a stream of kids tending their herd of cattle, goats and sheep. But in some other parts of Nigeria, the stream of kids at that hour would have been in school uniforms heading to schools.
About 2012, I met the Education Minister, Prof. Ruqqayatu Rufai in Abuja at a forum speaking of nomadic and mass education and I asked her how the kids of those parts of Nigeria would be part of that since you could travel about 40km or a little less without seeing a school. From Kadauri junction to Bukkuyum, I can recall seeing only the Federal Government College, Anka. Even in Bukkuyum almost opposite the hospital is an open field with signpost of a school that I never saw any structure to signify the reality of the signage.
I don’t know if the fate of those dejected and rejected Nigerians has changed as I still hear that lead poisoning still kills. In fact, a native told me in confidence that the people live with the death constantly and only that the one I reported was more widespread and attracted media attention.
Today, Zamfara again is the destination of mass death, now of meningitis. Too bad! Too painful, so heartrending and worst of, the governor, Abudulaziz Yari, has attributed it to sex, sin and the anger of God. Really? It’s just confounding and I feel like smacking myself in anger and ask Yari how far he has gone in lifting the people dejected and forgotten and only remembered during election campaigns. In fact, which of the gods smote the commoners of Zamfara with mass death? Is it the god of bad leadership, corrupt enrichment of the Zamfara leaders or the God in heaven? God in heaven certainly wouldn’t have done that. It is caused by fornication? Who fornicated? The kids who died or who? Quite incredible to announce this blunder.
Governor Yari, hear this clear. The hand of God is not in that death. It is the hand of poor leadership that has shut those people out from knowledge on how to live safer, or have better amenities that would stop or safeguard against mass death that did it. As at the time I visited those places of death, I was told on good record that the governor then had not visited the towns, but sent a team of health workers that worked with officials of the Disease Control office of the Federal Ministry of Health to battle the problem.
It’s man-made ignorance of the people that predisposes them to unusual and avoidable death. If in doubt, Governor Yari try the experiment of giving these people better life from the mind to the environment and watch out and see how quickly the hand of death would be turned back and never return. Don’t blame the gods, but yourself. Please leave God out of that raging and stalking death and recreate the worlds of those people and that is what God gave you the privilege of political leadership to do. Kindly do that fast and stop this vain shadow chasing.
School enrolment in Zamfara has remained the least for ages in the country and we don’t really get a picture of what is done to stem that and change the course. Healthcare delivery of Zamfara hasn’t been a sweet tale. The provision of amenities to lift the poor villagers that live in tiny oval huts, including water in those arid locations never made the headlines. So how had the leaders of the state battled to save the people from these deaths and failed as to blame it on the gods?
Even in parts of the world that are so prone to natural disasters, the people have not given up and start adducing causes to vague imagination and shadowy conjectures. Please drop this decoy bait you have, leave out the god-did-it gambit and roll up your sleeves, get to work and the fortunes of the people would change.