DAHW does not abandon the people in Nigeria
In the late evening three workers of the German Leprosy and Tuberculosis Relief Association (DAHW) reach the hospital of Abeokuta wearing next to nothing – they came on foot, although they have a journey of more than 400 km behind them. They started by car from the DAHW office in Enugu. The old off-road vehicle is the most useful means of transport for longer distances given the road conditions in this country.
Fidelis Adebayo runs to the door to welcome his colleagues. The DAHW social worker based in Abeokuta already suspects what has happened: Shortly before reaching the destination the vehicle was stopped by an armed gang and their colleagues were robbed. Every worker of DAHW in Nigeria has learned how to behave in such a case: raise one‘s hands up slowly, follow the orders of the robbers and offer them politely everything they want.
In this case the robbers literally wanted everything: vehicle, money, watches, luggage and even some of the clothes and shoes of their victims. However, the workers of DAHW could save the most important thing: their own lives. “That is a kind of code of honour of the robbers, if the victim does not behave like a hero,” Fidelis explains and later adds, “You never will be able to understand Nigeria!”
It is no secret why there are so many armed gangs in the country: The gangsters are getting their automatic weapons from their principals. They are engaged by entrepreneurs or rich individuals to protect them and sometimes also to intimidate their rivals.
When the principals do not need these “protection services” anymore they just dismiss the people. They are allowed to keep the weapons so to speak as “support for starting a new existence”, the business of this new “Ego-company” is reduced to the basic competencies: robbery, blackmailing and intimidating – just what they had been doing before, but now it’s at their own risk. The people causing these problems don’t care about them and almost everybody in Nigeria can become a victim of these gangs – relief agencies as well as government institutions.
Fidelis shrugs his shoulders, he does not have a solution either, “We just try to travel in the daylight only, when the danger is not as great.” An alternative would be not to travel throughout the country to the many small places far away from the great mega cities. But for the DAHW worker this is out of question, “Who else will take care of the people who get leprosy or tuberculosis and are in urgent need of help? Many of them do not have any possibilities for travelling to the next big town or to a hospital.”
In the most highly populated country of Africa, almost 5,000 persons are diagnosed annually with leprosy; the darker number of unreported cases might be much higher. Every year, more than 500,000 people get tuberculosis and, what is more, one in every ten of them in combination with HIV/AIDS.
Almost all of these patients are from the poorest sector of the population, living in villages without any infrastructure or sufficient provisions or in the slums of the big cities where sometimes more than ten persons are sharing one room. “These are more than 500,000 sound reasons for me and my colleagues not to surrender to the violence in our streets,” Fidelis says when climbing his old motorbike in order to visit some patients – the people he does not want to leave alone in the future, either.
