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OPINION: The North And Tinubu’s Appointments

Published

2 years ago

September 25, 2023

by Lasisi Olagunju

President Bola Tinubu gave our country’s Minister of Defence and Minister of State, Defence to the North; he gave the North Minister of Police Affairs and Minister of State, Police Affairs; he gave the North Minister of Education and Minister of State, Education; he gave the North Minister of Agriculture and Food Security and Minister of State, Agriculture and Food Security. Again; he gave the North the Coordinating Minister of Health and Social Welfare plus Minister of Steel Development and Minister of State, Steel Development. To the North, again, Tinubu gave Minister of Water Resources and Minister of State, Water Resources. I can go on and on and add the Minister of Housing and Urban Development and Minister of State, Housing and Urban Development. No part of the South has that privilege of having ‘couplet’ ministers managing key sectors. It is double, double blessing for the North. I don’t think any president has ever done that – not even the insular nepotist, Muhammadu Buhari, did. But why did Tinubu do that? Sacrifice, obedience and gratitude for favours. Sacrifice (libation) to power timekeepers, obedience to janitors of politics, and gratitude to regime makers. “O Lord that lends me life, lend me a heart replete with thankfulness!” (William Shakespeare in Henry VI).

But my people say it is impossible to get it right if you are asked to sweep the compound of the witch. If you do it well, she will accuse you of overdoing it; if you do not do it well enough, she will accuse you of not doing it at all. The North is like Hades. In the pantheon of the Greek, Hades is that greedy god who wants more of everything and who shares what he has with none. The Yoruba have Esu which takes everything wholly and completely. Those who know who Esu is know how fatally wrong it could be to appease him with one hand; he demands your two hands and ten fingers (owo meweewa) to deliver his offerings. Yet, whether at home or at the crossroads or even in palaces, Esu takes; he does not give; and when he takes, he offers neither thanks nor thankfulness. Those who know his oríkì say he is the master of the marketplace who buys without paying; the one who ensures that nothing is bought and nothing is sold unless it is nightfall – and on his own terms. For their way to be free of trouble, all other deities worship and propitiate him. That is northern Nigeria; it is not enough that it has all the above. It wants more, and maybe all.

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The North is complaining. Its elites say they made this president, now the supposed side chick is ‘forming’ independence; he is neither singing their song nor dancing to their beats – the right way. I have a sultry parallel to draw here: The bed is made, the room is scented with the fragrance of desire, the groom is unknotting his boxers, yet the bride is complaining that her husband is not paying enough attention to her needs. What does the hot bride want to eat that is not yet on fire?

I do not belong to the Tinubu orchestra; what I sing here is my own chord. We may complain about the quality of some of the Tinubu appointees but the justice of the spread between the north and the south no one should. The cluster structure of the appointments would be seen by critics as the president zoning and centralizing prebendal privileges in the hands of regional power lords. His friends and fans would argue that the cluster pattern is the president’s way of ticking problems and attaching them to localised solutions. If the North has Defence Minister and the defence ministry’s Minister of State; if it has Police Affairs Minister and the ministry’s minister of state in addition to the National Security Adviser and the Chief of Defence Staff, should it still have the mouth to complain of lack of official attention to its endemic insecurity? If the North has the Minister of Education and the ministry’s Minister of State, should it still rummage for policies that will wean it of the blight of mass illiteracy and of having uncountable millions of out-of-school-children? If the North has the Coordinating Minister of Health and Social Welfare, should we ever hear it lament high incidences of child and maternal mortality and epidemics of preventable diseases? The whole of the agriculture ministry is ceded to the North; the entire Water Resources ministry belongs to the North. We wait to see how it will use these to feed its dying, hungry poor – more than eighty percent of its population. It is like now that the South-East has the Minister of Works, we wait to see who that zone will blame if the East-West Road remains unbuilt at the end of Tinubu’s reign. And, if the management of the economy is in the hands of the Lagos-Yoruba, the country knows who to attack now that a dollar is selling for a thousand naira.

Samuel Butler, author of ‘The Way of All Flesh’, warns that what is golden is tact, not silence. Although my fish does not swim in Tinubu’s river, I join this ‘noise’ because of the hypocrisy of those involved. New groups are being formed and old hacks are being activated to compose complaints. One of them is the Arewa Economic Forum (AEF) which recently accused Tinubu of what it termed ‘Yorubanisation’ and ‘Lagoslisation’ of his appointments in the economic and finance sectors. Chairman of the Forum, Alhaji Ibrahim Shehu Dandakata, at a press conference in Abuja said the North was not happy that it was being left out “in the Finance and ICT sectors.” Voices from outside the North are also being borrowed the perfect way slave owners deploy their bondmen to battle. There is an Ile Ife man whose business name is MURIC; he joined the orchestra from his Lagos base and wrapped the nepotism charge with boubou of religion: “All five key appointments made by President Tinubu to revive the economy were given to Christians and Yorubas mainly. These new appointees include the Minister of Finance, Wale Edun; the newly nominated CBN Governor, Dr. Michael Cardoso; Hon. Zacch Adedeji, acting chairman, FIRS; the chairman, Tax Reforms Committee, Mr. Taiwo Oyedele, and Mr. Tope Fasua, Special Adviser on Economic Affairs,” MURIC’s promoter, Ishaq Akintola, said in a statement. The MURIC man’s puppeteers did not tell him or he forgot to remind them that an Atiku Bagudu from Kebbi State is the Minister of Budget and Economic Planning. Ishaq Akintola is Yoruba, he is attacking the Yoruba; he is Muslim; he accused his Muslim-Muslim presidency of marginalization of Muslims. Perfect isé erú (slave job) delivered the erú way. In folklore, we tell the hunter to use the sword of Tortoise to kill Tortoise (idà ahun la fií pa ahun). One of the best newspaper articles I read on Nigeria’s north-south relations was written in the early 1980s by Banji Kuroloja, editor of the Nigerian Tribune from 1984 to 1988. Because the title of the piece came very simple and catchy, I will remember it forever: “Singing Their Songs.” I can’t forget. I also can’t forget the takeaway from it: “The ubiquitous North has a way of making others sing their songs.” Forty years plus after that article was published, nothing has changed; the falconer still holds the falcon by the throat, making it say what it is told to say. We’ve seen how abjectly the MURIC man recited his verse, shedding blood when the owner of the problem was shedding tears.

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Even the National Publicity Secretary of the North’s apex organization, the Arewa Consultative Forum (ACF), Professor Tukur Muhammad-Baba, joined the discourse. In a newspaper interview, he accused Tinubu of giving sensitive and lucrative appointments to persons from his ethnic Yoruba stock. He said Tinubu should not be doing what he is doing “in a deeply fractious federation like ours.” He remembered that “a part of the constitution directs that… appointments must reflect the social diversity of the country in terms of balancing, of place of origin, indigeneship, ethnicity, religion, etc.” Muhammad-Baba and his ACF did not remember the existence of this constitutional provision throughout the eight years of imperial Buhari, Bayajjida II of the kingdom of Northern Nigeria. “Few love to hear the sins they love to act.” That is how William Shakespeare, in his ‘Pericles, Prince of Tyre’, elegantly explains what hypocrisy does to people’s sense of shame.

Not knowing when to complain is a problem. That the North believes it has the moral right to talk at all is because it thinks itself senior in the Nigerian arrangement. But I know that the greedy is red-eyed twice: when he eats his yam alone and when his neighbours converge to eat their pounded yam. For eight years, Muhammadu Buhari dared the other parts of Nigeria outside his north and fed àdí (palm kernel oil) to Èsù with his provocative nepotism. He did it without personal consequences because he stood on very firm grounds of regional supremacy. While he wantonly shredded Nigeria’s garment of diversity, today’s noisemakers (and their slaves) egged him on with claps of endorsement. They okayed Buhari’s cronyism and hollered that the spread of the appointments was not necessary but that what mattered were competence and performance. They felt (and feel) no shame that at the end of their Buhari’s eight years, what was harvested from their farm of ‘competence’ and ‘performance’ was mass hunger and mass misery.

I know that there are certain All Progressives Congress (APC) masquerades who wear costumes of region and religion to complain about their not having posts (yet). If they are in the cold, whose fault should that be? Tinubu’s is a government of libation, everyone who has sense knows. But when you refuse to offer prayers in the right temple and drop sacrifices in the proper shrines, expect disappointments. There is a Festus Keyamo whose ministerial dream suffered reluctance of nomination and controversy of clearance. But, apparently because he knew in what river to wash his hands, his troubles eased off with apologies in sherds of remorse. There is, on the other hand, the petite Nasir El Rufai who went through the examination process supervised by prayerful Godwin Akpabio but had his result withheld by those who held the yam and the knife. What else is there to say when a pupil finds their report card in the mouth of the headmaster’s goat? Yet, there are some who got what they wanted because of the good boy and good girl they had been to the new powers in town. If you keep your palms clean, it is not every time you pour libation to dispensers of favours. And, I have here Ezeulu in Chinua Achebe’s ‘Arrow of God’. The old priest is full of apologies for not setting before his guests “even a pot of palm wine.” The response he gets is to the effect that “when a father calls his children together, he should not worry about placing palm wine before them” (page 143). But that is a father that has paid his dues and has not taken more than he has put down.

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Now, is it not a shame that the complaints we hear from the North are about elite privileges and not about the hardship in town? Think about the existential struggles of an average Nigerian and what interests the political class. Like an exasperated friend said on Friday, inflation is hitting the roof, the naira is sinking, market capitalisation at the Nigerian stock market is tumbling, people are dying, yet what interests the elite is what appointees come from their bedrooms. Instead of the northern elites complaining about the ethnic origin of those managing the economy, they should be worried about the calamity of their own failure as leaders and the collapse of all humanity in their region. On the streets of Ibadan, we encounter, daily, beggars from the North with heart-rending stories. This last Saturday, one of them, Harira Muhammadu, told the Saturday Tribune that she left her husband, aged father and children behind in Kano to face a “life of uncertainty” begging on the streets of Ibadan. She said she had no other choice than to beg because the North had collapsed and she could not afford to watch her children starve. “If things were easy and sweet for us back home, we would not come here to live this life of uncertainty. I have some children with me and I do not have anything to feed them with and it is a lot of work…I remember when I first came here many years ago, I did not know where to go or what to do and I was afraid and all. I would cry and wipe my tears. Sometimes, the children would cry with me but I endured because I knew that if I returned home (to the North) the suffering would be more severe,” she said.

There is no southern town or city without sad stories such as that of the beggar above. Yet, check all conferences, read books, monographs and pamphlets from the North, the poor perennially have no space there. There is never a conversation there on the imperative of finding a cure for the pandemic of poverty in that region. The North’s eunuch stands erect (or has an erection) only when there is a South to intimidate. Everything is about power and elite comfort carefully packaged as regional nationalism and/or duty imposed by religion. The elites of the North won’t keep quiet until they are back in power to ride roughshod on the other parts of Nigeria. Check how to deal with bullies. Stand up to them.

This article written by Dr. Lasisi Olagunju, Saturday Editor Nigerian Tribune was first published by the same newspaper, it’s published by INFO DAILY with permission from the author.

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Gbaboyor’s Allegations Against Otuaro Baseless, Malicious — PAP Office

Published

1 hour ago

December 8, 2025

Editor

The Presidential Amnesty Programme (PAP) has described the recent allegations made by Mr Jude Gbaboyor against the Administrator of the Programme, Dr Dennis Otuaro, as baseless and malicious.

In a video circulating on Facebook, which he purportedly recorded in the United States, Gbaboyor levelled grave and unfounded accusations against Dr Otuaro, including claims of murder, ritualism, and kidnapping.

Reacting to the video, in a statement issued by the Special Assistant on Media to the Administrator, Mr Igoniko Oduma, on Monday, stated that the video in which he called for the Administrator’s removal, “represents yet another desperate attempt by Gbaboyor to defame Otuaro’s character and undermine the credible work of the Programme.”

The statement added that “Gbaboyor now a fugitive committed the crimes of cyberstalking among others and decided to flee the country to evade arrest and prosecution.”

The statement emphasized that the said Gbaboyor was dismissed from the PAP due to his “unacceptable conduct some years back and should be discountenanced by the reading public.”

The statement reads, ‘’This is not the first time Gbaboyor has made outrageous and unsubstantiated claims against the PAP boss. His persistent campaign of calumny prompted the PAP Administrator to formally petition relevant security agencies, citing cyberstalking and criminal intimidation.

“When invited by the Nigeria Police Force to answer questions regarding these spurious allegations, Gbaboyor fled the country, effectively making himself a fugitive from justice.

‘’It is instructive to note that Gbaboyor’s relentless attacks on Dr Otuaro began only after the Administrator rejected his request for reinstatement at the Amnesty Office, from which he was previously dismissed several years ago due to his lack of character.

“Having failed to ingratiate himself with the PAP leadership and secure reemployment through proper channels, Gbaboyor has resorted to character assassination and the dissemination of false information.

‘’Particularly troubling is Gbaboyor’s appeal to the President of the United States to interfere in what is purely a personal matter under local jurisdiction. This represents a profound insult to Nigeria’s sovereignty and a misguided attempt to internationalise personal grievances.

‘’The Presidential Amnesty Programme urges members of the public to disregard these irresponsible acts and baseless allegations in their entirety. If Gbaboyor genuinely believes in the veracity of his claims, he should demonstrate the courage of his convictions by returning to Nigeria to substantiate them before the appropriate authorities and courts of law.

‘’Instead, his flight from lawful police invitation and subsequent attacks from abroad reveal the true nature of his campaign: a calculated effort to malign a public servant from the safety of foreign shores, beyond the immediate reach of Nigerian law enforcement.

‘’Under Dr Dennis Otuaro’s leadership, the Presidential Amnesty Programme has remained focused on its mandate of fostering sustainable peace and development in the Niger Delta region. The Programme will not be distracted by spurious allegations from misguided and individuals pursuing personal vendettas.

‘’The Presidential Amnesty Programme reaffirms its commitment to transparency, accountability, and the rule of law and will continue to pursue all legal remedies available to protect the integrity and reputation of the Administrator and the agency.”

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OPINION] General Christopher Musa: Lessons And Warnings

Published

1 hour ago

December 8, 2025

Editor

By Lasisi Olagunju

Better a child is confirmed dead than a child is unaccounted for. I am not sure we remember that about 250 pupils of St. Mary’s Catholic School, Papiri village in Niger State, remain in captivity. They’ve been with their abductors since November 21 without Nigeria losing a day’s sleep. And we say Donald Trump was wrong to say we are “a disgraced country.”

Anguish, helplessness and despair are not pleasant words to describe the state of anyone; but they perfectly fit the conditions of the parents of the missing kids. One distraught father told the BBC: “If they (the bandits) hear you speak about them, before you know it they’ll come for you. They’ll come to your house and drag you into the bush… I feel so bitter, and my wife hasn’t eaten for days… We are not happy at all. We need someone who will help us and take action.”

So, who will help them? Some of the kids, mere five-year-olds, sleep and wake up there in the bush; they must be wondering why they have to be in someone’s ‘prison’ while the country appears to have moved on. It is terrible.

It is “’Bout time this town had a new sheriff”, a law enforcer says in ‘High Plains Drifter’, a 1973 film that is about retributive justice, about criminals getting what they deserve; about a crime-wracked town that sounds almost like Lagos – it is Lago. The new sheriff is ‘The Stranger’ who brought precision guns, “reversals and exposures” and swept the town clean of crime and criminals. Read the text – it reads like Nigeria. And there is apparently a new sheriff in the Nigerian town. He is said to be Christopher Musa, smooth-talking, clean-shaven, debonair and handsome. But how far can he go?

“Be careful. You’re a man who makes people afraid, and that’s dangerous.” Sarah Belding says in the film above. Nothing should rattle a battle-tested General, yet Christopher Musa, the new minister of defence, must feel more than a flicker of awe at the sheer tumult of the welcome he has received so far. He must be even more afraid of the character of the system that has hired him. To help parents such as the quoted above, Musa has been drafted from retirement. But, what he is joining is no war council; it is a cruise party; the ship he has just boarded is not a warship built for battle against criminals. It is a yacht, a vessel for leisure, for politics, for power, and for wealth.

The man came highly recommended with very rare national acceptability. I’ve always believed that history rewards competence and exposes pretenders. If I say that your next position is encased in your present performance, I will be right. I look at the new Minister of Defence, General Musa. The whole world marked his script as our Chief of Defence Staff and said he passed. I do not have access to the marking scheme, but what I know is that the man is very fortunate. He has a sweet tongue and a good head but he has also worked hard to earn the epaulettes that light the path of his active engagements.

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Every feat and office has its witnesses. Julius Caesar did not become Rome’s most powerful figure by bribing consuls and senators and sowing discord in opposition forces. He worked positively hard in his journey of service. He was a General who solved problems. And a leader who solves problems becomes naturally indispensable. That is why Musa had to come back so soon after Nigeria retired him.

I cannot remember any appointment made by this president that has universal appeal and endorsement as we’ve seen with Christopher Musa’s. From the initial speculation to the announcement, to his Senate appearance and screening, the man suffered neither darts nor missiles. Even the fissures and factions of Nigeria spared him the usual smears. Everyone, everywhere owned him. He appeared (appears) loved by all.

A General will always earn the loyalty of his troops if they see and feel in him personal courage, discipline, and strategic clarity. Caesar did not directly lobby for leadership; his results made Rome accept his destiny. History says his rise was built on an extraordinary record in the Gallic Wars (58–50 BCE). In that war he subdued the major tribes of Gaul, captured numerous fortified towns, and brought almost the entire region covering much of what is today France, Belgium, Luxembourg, and parts of Switzerland, Italy, and Germany under Roman rule. By transforming Rome’s power Caesar transformed his own political destiny. History adds that he, as a General, displayed extraordinary engineering genius by building a bridge across the Rhine in just ten days and by leading two bold expeditions to Britain. The Roman General accomplished these feats and stunned Europe; his competence imposed him on his world.

Musa was sworn in on Thursday to pursue his own destiny; his hours started counting almost immediately. There is an experience of leisure and luxury called honeymoon. Every English word possesses a history, its etymology. The history of ‘honeymoon’ is rooted in medieval times when newlyweds shared a honey-fermented drink called mead for a moon cycle (a month of thirty days). It was a rite of fortune steeped in symbolism and was believed to usher the couple into a union blessed with good fortune, sweetness, and fertility. For today’s many newlyweds, rich or poor, honeymoon is “a cachet of distinction” which they all insist they must enjoy. But this beautiful bride, Musa, cannot have a honeymoon. I hope he knows. Accepting to be defence minister of Nigeria at this point is the same as accepting to fetch hot coal with one’s bare palm. With his two palms, and with all his faculties perfect, the new minister went for Nigeria’s smoldering balls of embers. What he accepted is a hot plate. You don’t go that far and still think you can pause and rest. He cannot.

Whatever he says or has said will be used to judge him. And he has been talking: He says he won’t negotiate with bandits: “No negotiations with any criminal, because those things compromise security. If you negotiate with them, they will never abide by it. It is just a monetary tactic, what they do is try to buy more time to acquire more arms, and then they will come out again. We have seen it repeatedly,” he said. The man insists that bandits are traitorous criminals, they do not want peace: “Terrorists are enemies of Nigeria; they have no respect for human life. We are going to go after them fully, working together with all security agencies…”

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General Musa will not negotiate with terrorists but the forces he will meet on the battlefield here are more than the bandits, Boko Haram and their brother terrorists. He knows there are powerful people who profess negotiation because bandits are their brothers. A war against bandits is against such men of means.

Musa needs the support of his appointers to deliver. This is where I pity him. His makers may have already achieved their aim: respite from Donald Trump and his troublesome band, home and abroad. In other words, the positive review which the president has got from the new minister’s choice may have been the end the system wanted; nothing more. I may be wrong; if I am wrong here I will be happy. US-based Professor Moses Ochonu put it more elegantly in a Facebook post: “While having a competent and uncompromised defense minister helps, the problem ultimately is not about who is the minister. Rather, it is whether there’s the political will, unsoiled by political and electoral calculation, to go after the terrorists, and whether the Tinubu government is willing to humbly admit that its non-kinetic counterterrorism strategy has not only failed but has emboldened the terrorists, and is, as a result, ready to move to a more offensive posture.” Musa should read this again as he prepares for this phase of his life and career.

The new minister can talk, and he has been talking. Musa wants Nigeria fenced round to combat terror. He said: “Border management is very critical. We have had countries that because of the level of insecurity in their country had to fence their borders. Pakistan fenced 1,350 kilometers of border with Afghanistan; that was the only time they had peace. Saudi Arabia and Iraq, 1,400 km border, is completely fenced.” Geography says Nigeria’s total boundary stretches roughly 4,047 km by land and 853 km along its coastline, giving it an approximate total perimeter of about 4,900 km. Now, let me ask Musa: Which of our own neighbours is our own Afghanistan? The truth is that we are the Afghanistan of Africa. We, not our neighbours, are the danger to be fenced off. The new minister and his team can change our story and our status. They won’t do that with weird ideas like border fencing which is potentially another project etched in the image of an elephant painted white.

But, then, I wonder where the fencing idea came from. The intelligent General from Southern Kaduna has probably forgotten that Boko Haram in the North-East started as a Nigerian start-up. The group has essentially remained a Nigerian brand exporting abhorrence to Chad, Niger, Cameroon, even Benin.

Again, has Musa, the gadfly, forgotten that banditry in the North-West has its roots in the historical tension between the Hausa and the Fulani? Did he listen to a recent interview by the chairman of the Arewa Consultative Forum (ACF), Alhaji Bashir Dalhatu, where he admitted that banditry and terrorism in northern Nigeria is self-inflicted? For the records, Bashir Dalhatu said: “We have fifteen million out-of-school children roaming the streets. If we had taken care of that, it would not have gotten out of hand.” The General should read Dalhatu’s lips and ask himself what a fence would do to prevent the multi-million idle hands from becoming the devil’s workshop. A fence will be as useless as a door locked against the enemy within.

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The Musa that I watched on TV has no deficit of education. Leadership has never been an accident of luck. Those who attained it worked for it; the best among them are the truly educated ones. Because of his apparent good education, this Musa is not like the one at the gate whispering peace to bandits. His voice has been very shrill against the enemy, but he needs more than his voice to win this war. The enemy is not the Wall of Jericho. He should fight criminals and battle those who excuse their crimes.

The man has a model to copy in legendary British Iron lady, Margaret Thatcher who had the IRA extremists to pummel almost four decades ago. In the midst of “The Troubles” and their bombs, Thatcher reminded her country that: “Crime and violence injure not only the victim, but all of us, by spreading fear and making the streets no-go areas for decent people…To be soft on crime is to betray the law-abiding citizen. And to make excuses for the criminal is to offer incentives to dishonesty and violence. Crime flourishes in a culture of excuses…” Thatcher did not just talk and go to bed; she followed her talk with concrete actions and degraded the enemy.

Our new minister needs good Nigerians to succeed and he already has them. If he will keep them, he must be felt more in action rather than in words. A billion words are mere hot air, they can’t fill a basket. Everyone knows this. Policies and actions that terminate banditry and terrorism are what will sustain his name and legacy of heroism. He will achieve that only when he fences off bloodline politics and treats crime as crime.

I go back to Thatcher. To our president and his minister, I recommend the words of the Iron Lady uttered on October 12, 1990 (35 years ago). She told her Conservative Party that “crime is not a sickness to be cured; it is a temptation to be resisted, a threat to be deterred, and an evil to be punished.”

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Maternal Mortality: MMS Tackling Scourge —Bauchi Women Testify

Published

1 hour ago

December 8, 2025

Editor

Some women in Bauchi state have testified that the introduction of the Multiple Micronutrient Supplements (MMS) during antenatal care was a life saving medication reducing maternal mortality rate in the state.

Some of the women spoke with newsmen on Monday while the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) Bauchi Field Office led some journalists to observe the level of acceptance and testimonies from them.

According to them, the intake of the MMS has eliminated all sorts of fatigue, weaknesses and sickness that accompanied pregnancy making them feel less worried about the delivery day.

A 26-year old Maryam Musa with nine months pregnancy, who explained that she initially felt reluctant taking the MMS drug due to its size and colour, said the acceptance of the drugs had greatly helped her and the pregnancy.

“This is my first time having a baby and I’ve been taking MMS along with folic acid but the MMS is very effective because before I started using, I did fall sick but after the medication everything stopped.

“I can feel the baby moving in my belly and I do all my house chores myself and I’m calling on all pregnant women to register for antenatal care because it’s very important to you as a mother and the baby,” she said.

She advised women who collect money from their husband, lying that the drugs were sold to them to desist, adding that their well-being and that of their baby should be their top priority.

Also, a first time physically challenged pregnant woman, Khadija Mai-Auduga who spoke through an interpreter, said even since she started taking the Multiple Micronutrient Supplements twice daily as prescribed, she hadn’t complained of anything so far.

Mai-Auduga, who explained that her husband is also physically challenged, said he has been supportive of her antenatal care and the intake of the MMS because they wanted to have a healthy child.

A mother of six Aisha Usman who acknowledged that she hadn’t taken the MMS before except during her last birth, said the baby came out differently from others.

“I’ve never taken the MMS drugs until this last baby and I really enjoyed myself. The baby came out differently from the rest of the children. She is very healthy .

“I’m calling on all pregnant women to be taking that MMS because it’s very important for you, the mother and the baby.

“In fact the last one I had was a stillborn baby because I didn’t take any drug but this one came with no complication at all thanks to the MMS,” she said.

Auwa Adamu, Head of facility,
Primary Healthcare Centre Kofar Ran, also referred to as Urban Maternity explained that those pregnant women without a trace of anemia were administered MMS only.

“For those that have mild and moderate anemia, we give them the MMS plus the folic acid while we normally refer those with severe anemia for further management,” said Adamu.

She said that the impact of MMS has been excellent as mothers have been looking more healthier and the babies delivered at the centre have been looking healthier as well.

Speaking with newsmen, Dr Rilwanu Mohammed, Executive Chairman, Bauchi State Primary Healthcare Development Board (BSPHDB) said the MMS contained 13 mineral elements plus two folic acids geared to ensure that mothers got all the energy, vitality, and supplements needed for herself and her baby.

These supplements, he said, are capable of reducing maternal mortality, anemia which is also one of the causes of maternal mortality.

Philomena Irene, Nutrition Specialist, UNICEF Bauchi Field Office, said that 134,280 bottles of MMS were provided to Bauchi State through UNICEF as part of the scale-up with support from the Kirk Foundation and training of the Health and community workers by Gates Foundation.

She added that UNICEF would continue to ensure that MMS is integrated into routine antenatal care, train frontline health workers and supervisors on counselling, side-effect management and adherence support.