There were waves of joyous felicitation at the beginning of this week on the occasion of this year’s Mothers day. Splashed across social media were photos and videos tinted with goodwill messages, prayers and best wishes for mothers, not to count phone calls from loved ones near and afar.

The happy cheers were quite heart-warming.  Mothers are indeed special. Thinking about mothers, my mind goes back to the recent movie drama “Maami” in which Funke Akindele portrayed the heart-warming and passionate role of a mother who in spite of having so little, gave so much.

Medical practitioners usually refer to mothers as the ‘first doctor’ in the home. This term is derived from the fact that mothers are usually the first to recognise symptoms of illness in a child or the first to get the report of ill-health. On the basis of this recognition, they are able to administer First Aid to the affected child or family member. Mothers are usually the first to take the initiative to bring a child to the hospital (hopefully, on time) and to therefore also receive first-hand information from the health provider on the necessary steps to nurse the child back to good health. Their ability to relent on myths, superstitions and harmful cultural practices also determine to a great extent how healthy our children will be.

Let me share five reasons why mothers are the ‘first doctors’ in the home:

1. Mothers ‘doctor’ children from the womb. During pregnancy, their bodies house us for most of a year. They give up their body shape and space for the endearing new-born in the offing. Many mothers have to take up almost permanent hospital residence in those months for the sake of that precious baby. It is from the mother that oxygen and nutrients diffuse to the foetus. Mothers provide warmth to the foetus and incubators can mimic this God-infused ability only to a limited extent. The decision of a mother to eat healthily, to avoid substances such as smoking and alcohol in pregnancy as well as to nurse healthy emotions have lasting consequences on the baby.
2. Mothers virtually nurse from the cradle till after the nest is empty; starting with breastfeeding which establishes a bond that lasts a lifetime. Through breast-milk, they transfer protective antibodies and immunoglobins which reduce the risk of neonatal illness. They take overnight calls, breastfeeding at night or keeping awake over an ailing child; tepid-sponging in order to keep down a fever. They ensure healthy meals at home and at school.  They have this way of caring even if through tough actions. If not for their hygienic efforts, vomiting and diarrhoea would frequently feature during school days.
3. Mothers love cleanliness and try to maintain orderliness. Sweeping, scrubbing and dusting are unending house-chores yet they do it every day. A colleague of mine was tagged Mrs Clean by her husband in this regard. Mothers will always remind you to brush your teeth, wash your hands and dust your feet before getting into bed. Without all this seeming much-ado-about-nothing, many of us would fall sick often. Doctors frequently counsel on hygiene in order to prevent and control the spread of disease. 
4. Listening is a vital communication skill that mothers have exhibited through the years, listening, paying attention, reading in between the lines so as to decipher what the real problem is. Doctors do the same when encountering their patients. Listening helps diagnosis.
5. Mothers have a sixth sense. It’s called intuitiveness. Most moms can describe to you that uncanny feeling that something is not right even when you have explained all the possible reasons why it should be. They know when you have not swallowed your medicine. Many people seem to think that doctors are magicians. This is because they expect the doctor to decipher all their medical problems without much information. Doctors also depend on high indices of suspicion during history and examination to arrive at the right diagnosis especially when there is a paucity of information. Having a consistently correct index of suspicion comes with years of training and experience.

Mothers from time memorial stand out as a special ‘kind’ of people. You can call them super-moms, super-heroes or super-stars, but they are definitely humans with feelings, strengths and weaknesses. Applauding their positive contributions to family development today, the ‘International Day of Families’ is certainly not out of place. The stronger and healthier our mothers are, the stronger and healthier our families will be. 

Dr Oore Makinde is a Consultant Family Physician and certified Lifestyle Medicine Physician. She is the founder of Lifestyle Champions International

The two women I am writing about today epitomise the incredible resilience of the human spirit. Unbent, unbroken, they have shouldered on in the midst of the most dangerous, most challenging of conditions.

The older woman I shall call Mama J. When her town was overrun by the Boko Haram insurgents, she fled with her husband and three children to another village where there was an IDP camp. There, her husband and two children were welcomed, but she was refused entry? Why, because she had a 31-year old son with both learning and physical disability. She was practically given the choice of leaving her son behind if she was to be admitted to the camp. She refused. She decided that it was better for her to die than leave her son out there to rot. She decided to go back to her town that was overrun by the insurgents. She therefore made the journey back, walking over the next two days, practically carrying her son along. When she got back to town she found that the security forces had taken control and a new camp had been set up. But there again she was refused help. Unbroken, she started to run a vegetable business, with a 500 naira given to her by a soldier. This was in 2017. Today, she is no longer selling in measures but in big sacks. She has been able to out together a whole spectrum of vegetable combinations, and has become one of the key sellers in the community. She now makes up to 3,000 naira a day. When we asked her how she managed to succeed and expand her business within such a short period of time. She answered that she was able to put together a unique combination that no one else was offering in the community. You can only begin to grasp the awesomeness of her business acumen when you realise that this woman has never had a single day of formal education. She understands the idea of unique selling point in such a deeply practical and effective way, more than management and entrepreneurship scholars can theorise. When asked what’s kept her going against the odds, her response was brilliantly casual: “I have no choice but to find a way…”

The next story is equally humbling. I was going on about Mama J and got carried away a bit, forgetting that there is another woman, younger, that we have also invited along to the workshop. Let’s call her Lady H. She sat quietly, unflustered, as I stood there singing the praises of her counterpart from Maiduguri. Colleagues reminded me that we need to hear her story too. Of course, she duly obliged in what became a truly remarkable, inspiring story of doggedness and unrelenting hope and ambition against the odds.

Lady H lost her husband, father and one son to the insurgents in one fell swoop. The sheer trauma of the losses in such tragic circumstances can only be imagined. Yet this woman was determined to move on with her life. She managed to escape with her three other children. She ended up in an IDP camp. There, she began to rebuild her life, block by block. Having lost her entire restaurant business to the insurgency. She volunteered for an NGO in the camp for several weeks, earning about 10,000 naira (£23) in the process. With this 10,000 Naira she set up a business that includes trading in agricultural produce. For good measure, she set up a support unit for other women in the camp to learn a trade/vocational skills and begin to earn a living for themselves. Crucially, she is especially passionate about the education of children, about which she has been leading advocacy efforts to raise standards of teaching in the camp schools. She laments that children sometime leave school by 10am, and many of them can not write their own names. Today, while she remained in the camp, she has managed to raise enough income to send her two younger children to a private school far away from the camp, and the oldest is studying law in a higher education institution. Not bad at all for a widow who lost half of her family in very tragic circumstances.

One final comment about these two remarkable women: their infectious, unrehearsed cheerfulness is in and of itself a transforming experience. They are clearly not satisfied about their conditions, and they spoke openly and forcefully about it. But they would also not be denied the liberty to be joyful, to be grateful about little opportunities they have had to begin to rebuild their lives. Their story is powerful in more ways than one. Among others, it points to a new, and more effective pathway to engage with humanitarian action. Affected people are of course desperate. Yet they are not without agency to turn things around, rebuild their lives and recover their livelihoods.

The theme of justice has continuing relevance in our age. It resonates strongly as we think of hundreds of millions of people who live under oppressive regimes; as we remember the school girls abducted by Boko Haram terrorists few years ago; as we consider the plight of an estimated 40 million in modern slavery. While we must continue to use our energy and resources to fighting these evils, today I invite you to focus attention on another great evil of our times: Poverty.

Today, about 600 million children live in extreme poverty. They belong to families who have no means to provide food or clothing, and who cannot afford to take their sick children to the doctor. According to FAO, about 815 million people suffer from chronic undernourishment, and about three billion people live on less than $2.5 a day. Perhaps the most tragic fact is that this level of poverty is happening in the age of unprecedented wealth for the world. According to Global Wealth Report, global wealth rose in 2017 at a rate of 6.4% to reach $280 trillion, outpacing population growth. However, the global gains in equity is more than matched by the global rise in inequality. Forty percent of the world’s population accounts for 5% of global income. On the other hand, twenty percent of the world’s population accounts for three-quarters of world income.

Poverty is the great scourge of our age. It is a stain on the conscience of the world, an indictment of our essential humanity. It is a plague and a disease that must be fought with utmost vehemence.

Yet, the poor of the world do not merely seek to be cast as pitiable, helpless souls. In the most difficult of conditions, they are simply getting on with it.

The wretched of the earth may be lacking in opportunity, yet they are not lacking in agency. The artisan in Bali may need to up his skill, yet he does not seek our pity. The Nigerian farmer is not begging for alms, he just want to get his produce to the market. Throughout the world, millions of people shut out of formal institutions and neglected by national governments, are exercising their entrepreneurial agencies to create value, generate income, and beat the poverty trap.

Theirs is an uphill struggle, not for lack of effort, but for lack of opportunities. Their endeavours are made difficult by bad Samaritans who, once they reached the top, kicked away the ladder; by those who, while they preach the gospel of free trade, have shut the doors and mount the walls of tariffs and restrictions.

Yet wealth creation does not have to be a zero-sum game, nor does sustainable development. The most effective strategy to fight poverty is to pull down the walls and open opportunities for entrepreneurs at the bottom of the pyramid to break into the mainstream. The old paradigm of development interventions must give way to a new approach of entrepreneurial support. Paternalism must give way to partnership. Enterprise must lead the way.

Let us come again to Dr King. When he invoked the metaphor of a river and a mighty stream, he was addressing the key problem of access- how millions of African Americans were shut out of the justice system, excluded from the opportunities for the pursuit of happiness. Today, we reflect on the global scourge of poverty, and how billions are shut out of sharing in the world’s wealth. The clarion call today is to break the barriers, open opportunities and provide support for millions of the world’s entrepreneurs. Only by doing so can we truly let wealth flow like a river, and riches of the earth like a mighty stream!

For Nigeria, however, this is not the complete picture. In the same World Bank report, we are told that: “Despite the high economic
growth reported in official statistics, Nigeria has yet to find a formula for translating its resource wealth into significant welfare improvements for the population. Job creation and poverty reduction are not keeping pace with population growth, implying
that the number of underemployed and impoverished Nigerians continues to grow. With a median age of 14 and population growth
at close to 3%, the very stability of the country depends on a major acceleration in the creation of jobs, opportunities, and basic social services for the population.”

This is the crux of the matter: basically, whereas there has been growth in GDP, there has been no commensurate progress in poverty alleviation. There has been no improvement in the lives of the people. National wealth is increasingly concentrated in the hands of the few, to the detriment of the vast majority of citizens. This is consistent with the fact that Nigeria has arguably one of the world highest, and certainly African highest, number of private jets, owned by people who are not known for their remarkable success in industry and business, but for their connections with the high and mighty in power. They are the clerics, the politicians, the big government contractors, and semi-retired militants. How did the matter reach this point, and continue to grow worse as we speak?

There has been a desperate lack of vision, clarity and political will. We have had high sounding rhetoric, but little to show for it. The agricultural sector, for example, employs at least 60% of the country’s population, majority of them subsistence, small scale farmers living below the poverty line. Therefore, it’s no rocket science that, in order to promote inclusive growth, the government need to give the agricultural sector a priority attention.  Although there has been some efforts in recent years to give agrarian transformation some attention, the progress and impact is, on the balance, minuscule, compared with the enormous needs and opportunities.  Between 2011 and 2012, the agricultural sector actually slowed down, reducing from a growth rate of 5.6% to 4%. Also, while the services sector, especially telecommunications, has witnessed modest growth, the movement in manufacturing has been largely negligible, and this is not un-connected with low investment in infrastructure- electricity, transport, broadband, etc- and an almost total absence of incentives for local and foreign investors. To top it all, the education sector has moved from one crisis to the other in the past few years, most of it associated with government’s lack of adequate attention and investment in education. 

Sustainable economic growth can not be built by heavy reliance on commodity (read crude oil) prices. They go up and down. On the other hand, the current boom in oil prices represents a great opportunity to invest in the future and lay the foundation for structural transformation of the economy that is inclusive and based on expanding opportunities for all citizens in diverse sectors. 

And as we speak of the opportunities and reflect on the challenges, we must also remember the consequences. Chronic poverty is recipe for disaster. As we have seen already, unemployment is a fertile ground for the recruitment of terrorists and militants, and breeding of kidnappers, robbers and gangsters. The cause of national security is better served with visionary leadership and inclusive development, much better than machine guns and armoured tanks.

Both perspectives represent two sides of a conversation about pitfalls and opportunities, and they have generated much attention and interest, not just on these threads, but nationally, and indeed internationally.  First there is the learned cynicism arising from years of unpleasant experiences of failed promises from self-seeking politicians who perenially promise the high heavens but deliver hell and misery year and after year. We have seen, in our Nigerian experience, the reckless looting that is going on at the hghest echelons of power whilst ordinary citizens wallow in unmitigated misery and uncertainty about the security of their lives and property.

On the other hand we have also seen, amidst the rubbles and tumult of our decadent politics, opportunities for positive engagement. We have seen that, given an opportunity for citizens’ electoral choices to count, they can actually make a difference in choosing those they conside best equipped, in terms of expertise and moral standing, to conduct their affairs at all levels of governance. We have also seen that citizens can in fact exercise the same rights to undo bad choices and continually impose their will in the process of governance. These opportunities, it is true, are still in the infancy of development, and there is much that needs to be done to ensure that the electoral process is transparent and credible, and not just at the ballot box but also in the process leading to selection of candidates for office.

Let us now return to the original concerns that brought about this missive: are development and politics mutually exclusive? Is poltical participation necessarily partisan? And is partisan politics inherently evil or dishonest engagement? To answer the first question just think of any aspect of development that is dear to you. I’m thinking immediately of Education. Who is responsible for building our schools Who pays the teachers and workers in schools? Even for private schhols, who license and regulate them? The government! And who is the government? Those we elect to conduct the affairs of the community at different levels, assisted by civil servants who simply execute the agenda and project set by government officials.

So how do we ensure these elected leaders meet the needs and aspiration of the people with regard to Education, Employment, Infrastructure and other aspects of development? There are lots of ways, actually. One, and very important, is to ensure that we make our voices count in choosing the best in the community. In pursuance of this, it is very helpful, and important that we seek and share information that will help us make the best choices. Two, we must ensure that, beyond the time of choosing leaders, we must continually engage with them, scrutinise and support as occassions arise, and demand acoountability with regard to our aspirations and obligations. Both of these levels of engagement constitute the fundamental essence of political participation. Thus, it is the duty of well-informed citizens to ensure that the political process serve its fundamental purpose of fulfilling the desires and hopes of the citizens, rather than an instrument by which politicians lie and use citizens to achieve their selfish ends.

It behoves us then to ask: if it’s our duty to ensure that the best persons are chosen to conduct the affairs of the community, is there anything inherently wrong for anyone to put himself forward as a representative of the community? It cant be wrong; we can not at the same time seek to choose the best persons and still believe the best persons can not infact volunteer or put themselves forward. Even so, are there no pitfalls or dangers associated with involvement in partisan politics? Of course there are. First, as we have learned in Nigeria, there is always the possibility, nay preponderance, of deception, by means of which political apsirants make all the promises we want to hear in order to gain advantage and attain office, then unleash hell and terror once they attain power. However, to combat this the duty of citizens is to seek more infromation and commitment before making their choices, by scrutinising the antecedents of aspirants who make promises to check how they have done in the past with regard to promises and development efforts before they held any offices, or in the previous offices they held. In this respect it is much easier to filter out liars and opportunists who seek political office for selfish gains.

The second problem associated with partisan politics is the possibility of rancour, by means of which close family members, and otherwise good friends are driven apart to hostility on account of conflicts of interest in position seeking, and conflicts arising from participation on different sides of partisan poltiical divide. In this regard we say differences and debates are constant aspects of human experience, with or without partisan politics, and to grow as humans is to accommodate and learn to deal with, rather than evade, these differences. Only one rule of thumb must here apply: anyone who will take the slightest route of violence and terror is decidely unfit to represent the interest of the community at any level of governance, and citizens must exercise their rights to reject or remove such dangerous impostors from the corridors of political power.

I’ll end this piece with a quote from the ancient philosopher Plato. In The Republic, he quoted Socrates as saying: “He who refuses to rule is liable to be ruled by one who is worse than himself. And the fear of this, as I conceive, induces the good to take office…” (pg 21). And then again, in pg 141, he says : “Until philosophers are kings, or kings and princes of this world have the spirit and power of philosophy, and political greatness and wisdom meet in one, and those of commoner natures who pursues either to the exclusiion of the other aside, cities will never have rest from evils- and no, nor the human race, as I believe- and only then will this our state have a possibillity of life and behold the light of day.”

By Seun Kolade,

August 2011.