Dr. Stella Ameyo Adadevoh gave her life that others may live. It was she who physically restrained Patrick Sawyerr, Nigeria’s first Ebola patient, who had escaped from quarantine in Liberia to travel for an ECOWAS meeting in Nigeria. Although earlier diagnosis by another doctor had said Sawyerr was suffering from Malaria, Adadevoh was of the firm opinion that Sawyerr was suffering from the dreaded Ebola virus disease (EVD), a.k.a. Ebola hemorrhagic fever (EHF). She had never encountered the disease before but she was able to make the correct diagnosis. When all entreaties to Patrick Sawyerr to stay in confinement failed, Stella Adadevoh put her life on the line by physically barring the Liberian from leaving his confinement in the hospital, thereby exposing herself to the disease which eventually took her life. In dying, she saved 170 million other Nigerians who could have been at grave risk if she had not arrested Ebola at source.
My dear country is a place where heroism is hardly rewarded. But we love her all the same because it is the only country we can call our own. In most other countries, heroes and heroines of the Ebola war would have been national icons. Their names would have been etched in the hall of fame for all time. But here? Who cares!
I am ashamed and saddened to bring to national attention the fact that the salaries of some of the doctors who worked with the core team of staff from the Nigeria Centre for Disease Control (NCDC) who fought Ebola to a standstill have not been paid for three years. Trust our bureaucracy! While our elected and selected political operatives are going home with millions of Naira monthly, the medics who saved us from what could have been a pandemic are going home hungry.
Take the case of Dr. Madiebo, a project officer with the NCDC since September 2012, who was assigned the task of decontaminating the hospital room where Mr Sawyer had died in July 2014, and preparing his body for cremation. According to reports, Mr Sawyer had been confirmed dead at 7:30pm but his body could not be removed until 23:30hrs because everybody was scared of having contact with it.
Braving all odds because it all came in the line of duty, Dr. Madiebo undertook the task. He donned his protective gear and entered with a team of morticians to remove Mr Sawyer’s naked body from the narrow toilet where he had died.. They thereafter prepared it for cremation.
He received commendation from his superiors. Even the then minister of health, Onyebuchi Chukwu, publicly celebrated him when the World Health Organisation pronounced Nigeria Ebola free. Madiebo was promoted from Project Officer to Incident Manager on paper but he has never received the new salary, or any other wages since then. What a way to pay back patriotism and dedication to duty! His colleague, Colette Isu-Ezumah, who had relocated to Nigeria from the US in 2011 and was part of the 250-strong group of Nigerian volunteers sent to Sierra Leone and Liberia for six months to help in the fight against Ebola in 2014 and 2015 has similarly not been paid her due wages.
In frustration, and hopeful that the new wind of change promised by the newly sworn in President Buhari would bring an end to his woes, Dr. Madiebo emailed a written complaint to the Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of Health as ministers had not yet been appointed. He copied his six colleagues who were also being owed nine months’ salaries. But rather than receive apologies and succour, he was chastised for having the temerity to write directly to the Permanent Secretary.
“You have no such right to write me directly, knowing that you are under several layers of authorities in the Federal Ministry of Health,” the Permsec reportedly wrote. “Where is such impunity and unsatisfactory conduct coming from? …The terms of your engagement and payment of salary, to the best of my knowledge, was strictly under the Federal Ministry of Health/CDC Cooperative Agreement. Funding for your salary can only be accommodated under the Project and subject to availability of funding for which the CDC was unable to make further funding release to the Project….”
Dr. Abdul Nasidi, who was boss of the NCDC from 2011 to 2016, confirmed that the doctors’ salaries were not paid but does not accept any blame for the terrible situation. He reportedly confessed to a reporter that: “Even I am owed salaries”.
Now I hear that the Federal Ministry of Health under Prof. Adewole is desirous of doing justice to the consultants. The committee working on wider reforms at the ministry is led by Halad Keana who reportedly volunteered information that his committee would submit its report and recommendations to the minister this month.
Thunder can strike the same place twice. Ebola is gone for now, but another deadly disease may be waiting in the wings. Where shall we get the men and women of valour like Adadevoh ad Madiebo to put their lives on the line after the shabby way we have treated the anti-Ebola crew? We may yet find out to our consternation that bureaucracy could be deadlier than Ebola when it is designed to keep patriotic professionals away from coming to the rescue of their fatherland in times of need.
