Nigerians Plead For Foreign Help As Ebola Fears Spread
"Nigeria is in a serious mess," the 40-year-old electrical engineer told AFP. "We lack the capacity to deal with the situation."
Residents
of Lagos, sub-Saharan Africa's largest city with more than 20 million
people, returned to work Wednesday after a four-day break to mark the
end of Islam's holy month of Ramadan, a public holiday across the
country, even in the majority Christian south.
It
was the first workday morning in the bustling mega-city since
authorities confirmed that the worst-ever Ebola epidemic -- which has
killed more than 670 people since March in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra
Leone -- had reached Nigerian soil.
Patrick
Sawyer, an employee of the Liberian finance ministry, is thought to
have contracted the virus from his sister before travelling to Nigeria
for a regional conference.
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The
40-year-old died in quarantine Friday at a hospital next to the
Obalende market, where Ejiofor sat in his car on Wednesday, voicing
concern over Nigeria's response to the outbreak.
"If there is an Ebola epidemic
in Nigeria today, our health authorities will be too overwhelmed... The
government has to work with the World Health Organization (WHO)," to
stop the virus from spreading, he said.
Elizabeth
Akinlabi, a 30-year-old schoolteacher milling around Obalende, agreed,
saying that days after the Ebola death was confirmed, the government's
response remained lacklustre.
"A
lot of people still do not know about the existence of the disease, not
to talk of taking measures to prevent it," she told AFP, urging the WHO
"to come to the aid of Nigeria".
- Hospitals 'not prepared' -
Calls
for outside help are not common in Nigeria, Africa's most populous
country, which has a very low foreign aid reliance thanks to massive
earnings from its oil industry, which produces roughly two million
barrels of crude per day.
But in the economic capital
Lagos and other cities, people have little reason to trust the public
healthcare system, especially in the face of a potential crisis.
Many
public hospitals are acutely understaffed and ill-equiped. Some do not
have generators, a must in a country with multiple power cuts each day.
Compounding the current problem is a strike over pay launched on July 1 by all doctors employed at public hospitals.
A
crisis meeting by the striking Nigerian Medical Association held at the
weekend in light of the Ebola outbreak failed to end the work stoppage.
Most
Lagosians pay out of pocket for private healthcare at clinics ranging
from the enormously expensive -- staffed by doctors with degrees from
prestigious Western medical schools -- to cheap, ramshackle clinics run
by nurses with questionable credentials.
The special advisor on health
for the Lagos State government, Yewande Adeshina, acknowledged how lucky
it was that Sawyer was taken to First Consultants, a professionally-run
private clinic in the upmarket Ikoyi neighbourhood.
"I'm
grateful to God that was the hospital he went to," she told the private
Channels television station. "Because I'm not sure that a lot of our
hospitals were truly prepared."
- 'Worrisome response' -
Nigerian
officials have sought to limit panic since announcing Sawyer's death,
but mixed messages from the federal health ministry and Lagos state
officials have caused confusion among the media and public.
Health
Minister Onyebuchi Chukwu had to retract a statement claiming the
Liberian arrived on July 22, after Lagos authorities said he landed on
July 20.
Chukwu had insisted
that Sawyer was brought directly from the airport to a hospital, leaving
him "no time to mingle in Lagos" and infect others, but the accuracy of
that statement has been questioned amid the dispute over timelines.
The
minister further claimed that Nigeria had contacted and was monitoring
all passengers on the ASKY airlines flight that originated in Togo's
capital Lome and brought Sawyer to Lagos.
Abdullahi
Nasidi of Nigeria's Centre for Disease Control later indicated that
only a handful of the passengers had been found so far.
For
Francis Atufe, a 36-year-old banker and father of two, the government's
apparent struggle to manage the situation was "worrisome," and, like
others in the Obalende market, he voiced hope that foreign experts would
deploy across Lagos in numbers.
"I appeal to the WHO to come," he said.
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