FEATURE ARTICLE

Dr. Robert SandaWednesday, November 25, 2009
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Alberta, Canada

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IN DEFENCE OF THE NYSC: A TALE OF TWO SERVICEMEN (PART 1)

he bashing of the National Youth Service Corps (NYSC) has become a favourite pastime of some writers with nothing better to do. These individuals should be ashamed to call themselves Nigerians. Over time I have grown repulsed and disgusted by what they write. I am put off and lack interest in reading the product of despicable minds. I don’t know how anyone who has benefited from a heavily subsidized education that borders on charity by Nigeria can have the guts to attempt to discredit an honourable institution like the NYSC. Do such writers ever seriously stare at their own reflections in the mirror to take a hard look at the low life that has bitten the hands that fed him and took the ignoble path of tearing down a tested institution of nation-building like the NYSC?


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Reading the article by Obeya Francis Kizito Nigeriaworld Feature Article - RE: NYSC - Has it outlived its usefulness? was like reading the words of our national anthem. It gave me so much hope that the indifference of patriotic Nigerians who have served their country well under the NYSC program is finally giving way to concern about the disgusting emesis that is published as opinion. They are now on their feet fighting back in defence of the goals and objectives of the NYSC. I thank the writer for leading the way for this counterattack against shameless ingrates who were beneficiaries of government welfare and have nothing to give back by way of acknowledgement. Obeya Francis Kizito should not fight this alone: I am signing on as a fellow warrior. I am answering his call to arms to prevent the spread of the malicious propaganda of those lazy individuals who, in their new cozy countries of abode, have negated and forgotten what Nigeria did for them. These individuals must not be allowed to use the internet to contaminate and poison the impressionable minds of the Nigerian youths in the name of free speech. I really wonder, just like the above writer, if those calling for the dismantling of the NYSC ever served under it at all. If they did, they should tell us where and when so we can ask those communities to quantify the impact of their service on those communities.

In reality the vast majority of those who served their country under the program have memorable experience to share which would dwarf the experience of the rabble-rousers (Facebook | I once served my fatherland (Ex-Corps Member) Those who have been crying against political marginalization are the same ones who do not know that everyone in Nigeria, except the politicians, can lay claim to marginalization. They lock themselves in their small corners of the country and imagine that the rest of the country is developed or shares none of the problems and needs that are prevalent in their own places. One aspect of the NYSC that is undeniable and consistent in every account of service experience is the way it integrated the youths of Nigeria. I recall a youth corps member from Taraba state who served with honour and distinction in Rivers state by winning the National Honours Award in 1992. His service was appreciated by his host community who consented to his marriage to one of their daughters. Taraba or Rivers states, this couple will call it home. At the ceremony conferring him the honour the President, Ibrahim Babangida, showed his pleasure and lightened up the mood of the audience to a thunderous applause at the Nicon-Noga-Hilton hotel Abuja conference hall when he remarked “He came, he saw, he was conquered” referring to the young man from Taraba state and his wife. I know many more Nigerian young men and women who have married from areas that they did their services in. What better way can anyone think of to tear down the ethnic walls that we have built around our enclaves from behind which we perceive an assortment of enemies, real and imagined, who are plotting against our tribes? What better ways are there to turn Nigeria into one cultural and ethnic homogeneity and do away with the fractious politics that has determined our actions since independence? Anyone who has the interest of our country at heart would want to promote integration and equality for every Nigerian. I was adopted by a family from Plateau state whose four children (a girl and three boys) in various fields of endeavours married from Imo, Delta (two instances) and one of the Yoruba states. Their children will have to identify themselves as Nigerians as their states of origin has no meaning anymore.

For the rest of this article I want to share the experience of two doctors that served in Taraba state during the 1991/92 service year. By this I throw a challenge to those calling for the abolition of the NYSC to give a credible account of what they would do with one year if they are granted exemption from service.

Victor (I cannot recall his surname) was a young Yoruba doctor who found himself in Yola in September 1991 when Adamawa and Taraba states were created out of the former Gongola state. After the orientation we found ourselves posted to Taraba state. Victor was posted to a clinic serving an army battalion in Serti on the way to the Mambilla Plateau. He stayed in that military formation for about half of his service year until boredom got the best of him and he requested a transfer to another hospital. Soldiers, as expected, are physically fit and since few of them fell sick to need a doctor, Victor saw his presence in addition to the army doctors there as being redundant. He returned to Jalingo and submitted a written request to be redeployed to where his services were needed. The NYSC quickly issued him a new posting letter to go to Wukari General Hospital. He took a public transport and started on his three-hours-journey to Wukari full of expectations to have the challenges and opportunity to serve his fatherland that was not available in Serti. Well, it seems Heaven danced with joy and answered his prayers beyond his wildest imagination.

Eager for action he left Jalingo late in the afternoon soon after collecting his new posting letter. As the vehicle made its way to his new destination and with just about fifty kilometres to go, Victor would tell me later, the first thing that struck him as odd was the many road blocks they were coming across manned by armed soldiers and the police. After passing three or four of them, he ventured to ask a fellow passenger for an explanation. The passenger turned to him and asked, “Are you new in Nigeria?” The passenger explained that there has been an ongoing war between the Tivs and the Jukuns and that Wukari was a town under siege and an official war zone. Victor confessed that the only reason he continued with his journey was because it was too late for him to turn back as the sun has already set and the road was deserted with almost no vehicles travelling in the opposite direction.

He arrived at Wukari to find a deserted town. He took an Okada (the daredevil obviously needed money so badly he was willing to dodge bullets) and requested to be taken to General Hospital Wukari. On arrival at his destination, he found the gates of the hospital locked. The hospital, like the streets of Wukari, was deserted. There was not a single living person in the entire general hospital except one armed security guard who was daring (or foolhardy enough) to report to work. After introducing himself to the security guard as a new doctor posted to the hospital, he asked to be taken to the house of the medical director of the hospital. He was told the hospital had no doctor for over a month because the last doctor had left for the relative safety of other parts of the state and no replacement has been sent in the mean time. He then asked to be taken to the house of the hospital matron. At her house, he introduced himself and told her to send out information to all the staff of Wukari General Hospital to report for duty the next day. He found a hotel and spent the night.

The next morning, he addressed the staff who turned up. He told them that he was not compelling anyone to report to duty but to seek volunteers willing to serve a community badly in need of medical services and that those who were not willing to work may return to their homes. At first he got a few volunteers to attend to the sick and the injured in what was a guerrilla warfare with a heavy casualty. In due course, those among the hospital staff who expected the new doctor to run away to safety like his predecessors were awed by the fearlessness and determination of this new doctor. Victor remained in Wukari until the end of his service after the war came to an end with increasing presence of the army.

Victor disregarded his own safety and put the welfare of the people of Wukari first and foremost in his list of priorities. Prior to the deployment Victor has not set foot in Taraba state. He had no relations or friends in the state. The largest town in the whole of Taraba state at the time was without a functioning hospital just when it needed one the most. But the courage and selflessness of a young man who saw the people of Wukari as his own people made a big difference in their lives. While Victor was doing his own bit in Wukari for his Fatherland, about 150 km away in the same state another doctor was answering the same call of duty.

I was posted to a place in Kurmi District of Sardauna Local Government Area called Sabongida Tukura Community Health Center for my primary assignment. On arrival, I found that I was the only doctor in a radius of eighty kilometres. Little did I know that for the rest of my service year I would learn to live without electricity, water, television, newspapers, and the other social amenities I left behind in Kaduna. I was cut-off from Nigeria. My only source of news was a small transistor radio. I could get the BBC and VOA most parts of the day but the only Nigerian radio stations I could catch, Radio Nigeria Kaduna and Enugu only broadcast at my frequency in the morning and at night. It was easier catching broadcasts from Cameroon than from Nigeria. How do you run a hospital without electricity? They didn’t anticipate this in medical school so I couldn’t answer my own question and no one around could. Another NYSC member who was from the B-batch of the previous year was a laboratory technologist. We had a refrigerator that ran on kerosene burners so we could store essential items like vaccines, blood, and reagents. Besides this fellow from Oyo state, the next most educated medical personnel in my staff was a community health assistant. The other six or so four community health aids and two security guards. The small community health center had about ten beds, a store with drugs, an operating theatre that had a transparent roofing sheet to let in sunlight with which I see when performing operations. I had no anesthetist, no pharmacist, no staff nurse and no midwife. I was responsible for an estimated 50,000 Nigerians as well as a small number of Cameroonians who would cross the border 40 km away to come for treatment because the nearest Cameroonian doctor was much farther off. The clinic was like four hundred meters from my house and the road was crossed by a stream which in the rainy season is knee-high and I must cross it twice daily on my way to and from work. As happens almost daily, I need to go to the hospital several times at night to see patients coming in or to check on those admitted. There was no nurse to assist me looking after the patients in the ward. That meant wading inside the stream several times a day. Eventually I would contact a disease called Schistosomiasis from the act of crossing the stream regularly. Incidentally, Schistosomiasis was the subject of the thesis I wrote in medical school.

I saw patients big and small from far and near. I was surgeon, anesthetist, obstetrician, paediatrician and physician all-in-one. My community health assistant was my deputy. If a pregnant woman was in labour I was literally in labour also. With no midwife to entrust such women to, I have the choice of staying with the patient overnight in the hospital until she delivered or, more usually, I could be going to and fro my house on hourly basis to check her progress until delivery. Snakes were common and I had to use a torch-light to go to the hospital at night. I was on duty around the clock 24/7 without a public holiday or vacation. As sometimes it happens, some patients come with life-threatening emergencies in the middle of the night and I had to operate them at night or face the prospect of killing them by default. Without an electric generator my night operations were conducted with two torch-lights held, usually, by the security guard.

I recall one Sunday afternoon a young man was brought to the clinic by his friend. The patient had acute appendicitis and I needed to operate before the sun went down and I would have to use torch-lights to operate. The degree of pain the young man was experiencing necessitated operating immediately or risk life-threatening complications. There was a problem. It was weekend and most of the staff were in another village about seven kilometres away on the market day. I scoured the village and found two ladies. One was a laboratory assistant and the other was a community health aid. We constituted all that was left of the medical staff of the hospital. I assigned one to take care of the patient’s breathing while the second was to mix and administer intravenous drugs to keep the patient unconscious. I had to recruit the companion of the patient, a secondary school student aged around 15 years who had never been inside an operating theatre before, to be my surgical assistant. I had no choice. He said he didn’t know what to do. I told him that I would give him specific instructions and I told him it was either him or we would have to wait till night time when the other hospital staff return and by that time his friend could have serious complications. I set aside ten minutes or so to tell teach him about maintaining sterility in the operating room and another ten minutes to guide him through the process of scrubbing and wearing surgical gowns. Slowly and surely we successfully operated on this young man and removed a gangrenous appendix about to rupture. The patient did well postoperatively and was discharged home a few days later.

One of the greatest acts of kindness I have ever done in my entire life occurred in this tiny village in the jungle. A mother brought her 5-years old son to hospital and I examined him. He was having severe anemia with heart failure and needed urgent blood transfusion. The problem was that we never have enough blood in our blood bank and that morning there was not a single pint of blood in our blood bank. I told the mother that her son needed to be transfused and that she should go and find a pool of donors from whom we will select someone with a compatible blood group and extract blood to transfuse her son. She offered to give her own blood to her son. There was a problem: she was advanced with pregnancy. I told her she cannot donate blood with a pregnancy. The mother left in search of donors. She came back several hours later. Her eyes were flowing with tears as she narrated her futile efforts to find a single person in the whole village willing to donate blood for her son. The problem was that the boy was born outside wedlock and his father, who lived in a village far away, had never claimed paternity. Because of the social stigma attached to kids born out of wedlock, nobody in the clan was sympathetic to the mother. The mother insisted on giving her own blood in spite of her pregnancy but that was medically unacceptable. It was one of those moments of helplessness that a doctor faces sometimes. As I sat there watching this mother weeping profusely in front of me a thought entered my mind. How could a man disown his own son so young and not be there for him when he needed his father? Instantly I realized what I could do. I could be a substitute father for that boy. I called the laboratory technologist and asked him to check the boy’s blood group. Minutes later the result came back. Group B positive! The boy had exactly the same blood group as mine. Of the eight possible groups, the boy and I shared the same type. I stood up and donated a pint of blood for ‘my child’ and subsequently transfused my own blood to him. Two days later he was back to his active life and playing. As I looked at him the joy I felt was incomparable. Like I wrote earlier, to this day there is nothing I have done in my life to compare with being there as a father for a boy nobody wanted. That wasn’t to be the last time I would donate blood for my own patient.

A little later, a mother of five children from a neighbouring village who had been having vaginal bleeding for several weeks came to me for consultation. She was very ill. I decided to do a gynaecological examination on her. I found that she was having uterine cancer. The nearest hospital from us where she could be treated was the Jos University Teaching Hospital which was nearly five hundred kilometres away. The family was so poor they could not afford the cost of travelling and treatment in Jos. Besides, the patient was too ill and the bleeding would not stop. I calculated that with an intervention from me she could live a few months longer but without it I doubted she could live another week. I told the husband that I had to operate at once and I needed a minimum of three pints of blood. I sent him off in search of blood donors. Later that night when the bleeding became profuse, I decided it was time to operate or to lose her. With torch-lights shining over the operation field, I proceeded to remove her uterus to stop the bleeding. The operation went as well as could be expected. She needed blood badly but her husband hadn’t shown up yet. By morning he arrived in tears begging me to take three pints of blood from him to give his wife. As I watched this grown man and father of five facing the prospect of losing his partner because not a single one of his kin and acquaintances would come to his aid in his hour of need, compassion took over me. I sent him to the laboratory to test his blood group. His blood group was B positive: same group as mine and same group as his wife. I went with him to the blood bank as we lied down on adjoining couches and donated one unit of blood each for his wife. I told him that the two pints we have donated will tide her over and that if I needed more blood I would ask him to return in a week to give one more. He left with profuse gratitude and called me his “real brother”. His wife lived for a little over three months before she died. Plenty of time, I guess, for them as a family to come together to face the death of their mother and wife and to settle any differences and ask for forgiveness from one another.

An outbreak of measles occurred in December 1991 and many children were at risk because measles vaccinations were not carried out in the preceding two years. I had to ride a motorcycle to Takum to get vaccines and proceeded to carry out a massive vaccination of all eligible children and brought the outbreak to a halt. A few months later an outbreak of cholera occurred in three villages affecting 53 people and killing 11 of them. I worked late hours trekking and combing villages collecting data, giving health education, treating cases and enforcing quarantines. By the time the state ministry of health responded to my distress call nearly a week later, I and my team of community health assistants have brought the outbreak under control.

The service year was hard for me. In 1992 when the Medical Salary Scale (MSS) was approved and doctors like me were receiving a minimum of N2000 per month, my salary was limited to the N300 that the NYSC was paying me monthly. The hospital I was working in did not make that kind of money to pay for my salary at the scale of the MSS. To get that small salary, I had to ride a motorcycle over an 80km-distance to the nearest bank in Takum. I had the option of paying N60 out of my N300 for a two way ride by commercial vehicles to get the money. Because my NYSC supervisors failed to hear feedback from me they assumed that I had absconded and stopped my salary for four months. Without a kobo to call my own and living on the charity of my community who continued to give me food night and day I pulled through and continued work. One day I found myself without a tooth paste and without a toilet soap to take bath and no money to buy one from the only shop in the village. It was then I decided I should fight for my rights. I travelled to Jalingo to prove that I was at my post serving the country all the while. Not even the fact that I had to return empty-handed on account of the fact that the NYSC accountant was away in Abuja and no one had the authority to issue me my outstanding allowance in cash or cheques stopped me from retracing my steps over 400 km back to my place of primary assignment to continue serving my community. In fact the money was eventually paid to me on my final day as a serving NYSC member. It didn’t matter.

The year I spent serving my country as a rural physician remains my most productive and my greatest contribution to a country that subsidized my education and provided social amenities that neighbouring countries like Cameroon, Chad, Niger and Benin are dreaming of. Nigerian politicians may be the most faithless, most selfish and the most incompetent leaders on the whole planet they remain my leaders and nothing they do or fail to do can take away the fact that Nigeria is mine and I am Nigeria’s.

There was no amount of money that could have induced me to work in that austere locality for a day let alone for a year. The NYSC sent me there against my wish but my personal inconvenience probably saved hundreds of lives. So has the NYSC outlived its usefulness? My reply is, “Will it ever outlive its usefulness?” Was the kind of service Victor and I gave to our Fatherland a waste of our time? Victor and I received awards from Governor Jolly Nyame in August 1992 as the two best members of our batch. We were both nominated for the NYSC National Honours Award. I was one of 20 NYSC from across Nigeria that received the at the hands of the President. The award, in my view, was an honour not just for my contribution to the NYSC in Taraba state but for every man and woman who served with me in Taraba state during the 1991/92 service year. We all proudly served our Fatherland. It doesn’t matter what anyone thinks of the NYSC: what matters is that we gallantly lifted the green-white-green flag of our homeland to let the world know that we are proud of our country.

I salute all the young men and women who proudly served Nigeria under the NYSC.

Continued on Part 2


NYSC members representing all the states of Nigeria in alphabetical order from left to right with the author 8th from left representing Borno State during the Oath-taking ceremony in Yola in September 1991

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