Journalist Omoyele Sowore still remains in detention in Nigeria

 The founder of African investigative digital media site Sahara Reporters Omoyele Sowore remains detained in Nigeria on charges including treason, his wife Opeyemi Sowore told TechCrunch.

Her husband founded Sahara Reporters to create and aggregate news content, social media tips, and self-digital reporting toward exposing corruption in Africa and his home country of Nigeria.

After being jailed and beaten several times for his journalistic work in Nigeria, Sowore re-located to New York City and formed Sahara Reporters in Manhattan in 2006 to report under U.S. legal protections.

Several outlets, including Reuters, reported his arrest in August 2019. According to Opeyemi Sowore — who lives in New Jersey — her husband was detained in Lagos on August 4th while at a protest. He was then transferred to Nigeria’s capital, Abuja.

Per social media and press reporting, Omoyele Sowore (who goes by Sowore), was participating in #RevolutionNow movement of peaceful demonstration against bad governance in Nigeria.

After several hearings, he is still being held in Abuja, his wife said.

According to a copy of his court charging document obtained by TechCrunch, Sowore is charged with two counts of conspiring to stage a revolution and to remove Nigeria’s president, Muhammadu Buhari, from office “otherwise than by constitutional means.”

Sowore is also charged with cybercrimes for “knowingly send[ing] messages by means of a press interview granted on Arise Television…for the purpose of causing insult…and ill-will on the…President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria” and for money laundering based on a transfer of $19,975 from a Nigerian bank account to a Sahara Reporters held account in New York.

Sowore pleaded not guilty to the charges and rejected an offer of bail for roughly $800,000, according to press reports and his wife.

As for the veracity of the charges, Sowore’s wife Opeyemi believes they are a cover to go after her husband for his activism and work with Sahara Reporters.

Sowore has never been an advocate of violence or insurrection, according to his wife.

“If you look at his history he is the most peaceful person. He does what he does so Nigeria can work for all Nigerians…be inclusive of all ethnic groups, all socio-economic backgrounds, and religions,” Opeyemi Sowore said.

“I think the charges are about silencing a critical voice that’s shining light on corruption,” she added.

Not everyone is a fan of Sowore and Sahara Reporters’ work, particularly in Nigeria. The country has has made strides in improving infrastructure and governance and has one of Africa’s strongest economies and tech scenes.

But Nigeria is still plagued by corruption, particularly around its oil-resources, and has a steady-stream of multi-billion dollar scandals — yes billions — in state related funds being stolen or simply going missing.

Sahara Reporters has made a practice of reporting on such corruption. The site, which has a tips line and small TV station, has exposed improprieties of many public officials and forced a number of resignations in Nigeria’s government.

In the previous administration of President Goodluck Jonathan, Sahara Reporters played a role in exposing the theft of an estimated $20 billion in public funds by Petroleum Minister, Diezani Allison-Madueke, who was forced to resign and eventually arrested.

The internet, mobile, and digital media play a central role in the work of Sahara Reporters. In an interview in 2014, Sowore explained to me how these mediums often do much of the investigative work.

“In many cases, there’s less investigation to breaking these stories than you’d think. The corruption and who’s perpetrating it is generally well-known and the evidence easy to distribute through social media and devices. We just need a safe place to report it from, and the rest often takes care of itself,” Sowore said.

Ironically, Sowre’s own thesis of using digital and social media for advocacy may be tested on his getting out of jail.

Sowore’s wife is working on a campaign of global supporters — including Amnesty International — to shine a light on her husband’s charges, innocence, and press for his release.

Away from the activism and politics, “I want Yele to come home safely. I’m worried about his safety and we have two small children and they miss their father dearly,” Opeyemi Sowore said.

The trial for her husband Omoyele Sowore is scheduled for early November.

Tech Crunch

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It is estimated that one in 13 women in Nigeria die during childbirth, mainly because they cannot afford quality healthcare services. To tackle this, a humanitarian organization in Abuja is providing free healthcare services to women across the country CGTN's Deji Badmus has that story.

Nigeria has a mental health problem

On the outside, the Federal Neuro-Psychiatric Hospital Yaba seems tranquil.

But on the inside of this century-old facility - one of only a half-dozen psychiatric centres in Lagos, and the only one run by the federal government of Nigeria - tensions are running high.

At the outpatient clinic, the crowd of people waiting to consult with doctors is so thick that it spills into the hallway.

The workload is so overwhelming that Dr Dapo Adebajum, a psychiatrist rushing to attend to an agitated patient, has slept in the hospital for the past two nights.

In the emergency ward, a patient named Jide languishes in a queue where he has been waiting since 7am.

It is not yet noon at Yaba hospital, but this is business as usual. The hospital saw a 22 percent increase in the number of new patients with different types of mental illnesses in 2018 - along with a 50 percent increase in the number of patients struggling with substance abuse.

One in four Nigerians - some 50 million people - are suffering from some sort of mental illness, according to the World Health Organization (WHO).

Today - World Mental Health Day - finds the country nowhere near equipped to tackle the problem.

There are only eight neuropsychiatric hospitals in Nigeria. With dire budget and staffing shortfalls prompting doctors to go on strike, leave the country, or quit the medical profession altogether, the prognosis looks as grim for psychiatric care at Yaba hospital as it does for Nigeria's healthcare system as a whole.

Mental health crisis

The seventh-largest country in the world, Nigeria has Africa's highest rate of depression, and ranks fifth in the world in the frequency of suicide, according to WHO. There are less than 150 psychiatrists in this country of 200 million, and WHO estimates that fewer than 10 percent of mentally ill Nigerians have access to the care they need.

The stark difference between Nigeria's need for better psychiatric care - and the resources available - is illustrated by the healthcare gaps at Yaba psychiatric hospital, which had a 2018 budget of 133 million naira ($372,000) - but only 13 million naira ($36,000) or less than 10 percent of that amount released by the federal government.

As a result of financial deficits and other challenges, Yaba hospital lost 25 - roughly half of its resident psychiatrists over the past four years. Some left to find work in other countries. Some went to private hospitals. Others simply quit. The facility now has 33 resident doctors and 22 consultants scrambling to address the needs of the more than 5,000 patients that they treat every year.

Each doctor now tends to 50 to 80 patients per day - including the 535 who fill the inpatient beds, and the 100 or more emergency cases who are rushed to the hospital each week.

Yaba's psychiatric clinic, once open from 9am to 1:30pm, is now open until 5pm so its doctors can try to catch up on their backlog of patients.

Critics say Yaba's shortfalls are not only affecting the quality of its services, but the bottom lines of its patients and their families, too.

A father sitting next to his teenage daughter in the queue of patients tells Al Jazeera that he has spent 1,440 naira ($4, or half the average daily pay in Nigeria) to bring the girl in for that day's treatment. Because the journey - and the more-than-four-hour wait to see a doctor - are both so time-consuming, the exhausted-looking father has taken a full day off work - putting his family at financial risk - to give his daughter the psychiatric care that she needs.

Despite the long wait, the girl - who comes to Yaba about twice a month - will have only a short time to consult with her psychiatrist.

"A patient ought to spend between 25 and 30 minutes with the doctor, but ends up spending between four and five minutes," Yaba psychiatrist Dr. Afeez Enifni tells Al Jazeera.

The father says he is determined to make the most of what the hospital can offer his daughter.

"Health," he insists, "is more important than anything else."

'Bearing the burden'

This past summer, Yaba hospital's Association of Resident Doctors (ARD) held a four-week strike to protest the conditions facing the facility's practitioners and patients.

"We could not continue bearing the moral burden of rendering below-par mental health services to our teeming patient population," ARD said in a statement it issued at the start of the strike.

ARD president Dr Enifni told Al Jazeera that a main goal of the strike - which halted the admission of new patients for a month, required that emergency cases be turned away, and ended in promises to hospital employees that the facility has yet to fulfill - was to spur the hospital to hire more doctors.

Between 2014 and 2018, 40 doctors completed their six-year training at Yaba hospital - then sought employment elsewhere. Some may have left for financial reasons: Yaba doctors can face two-to-three month delays in being paid their wages. And due to a no-work, no-pay policy implemented by the Nigerian government, those who went on strike this summer may not receive the salaries they would have earned during the month that they were protesting.

Enifeni says the workload has become "unbearable" for the 33 psychiatrists and resident doctors who are still working at the hospital - one of a growing number of healthcare facilities in Nigeria where workers are going on strike.

Yaba spokeswoman Philomena Omoike said that though the hospital wrote to the Ministry of Health in June and requested 15 more doctors, that request had yet to be filled.

"The constant leaving of the doctors," she said, "makes recruitment harder."

Physician exodus

Roughly nine out of every ten doctors in Nigeria are seeking to leave the country and find work elsewhere, according to a 2017 poll by the nonprofit organisation Nigeria Health Watch.

The desire for better opportunities - improved pay, facilities, work environments, professional satisfaction, tax breaks and career progression - were among the reasons that psychiatrists and other doctors surveyed said they were hoping to emigrate.

Every week, reports the General Medical Council of the United Kingdom, at least 12 doctors leave Nigeria to seek employment in the UK, where they can earn twice as much as they do at home - and where the number of practicing doctors from Nigeria has more than doubled in the past 13 years.

As Demola Alalade - a doctor who won a psychiatric residency slot in Nigeria but chose to emigrate to the UK - told Al Jazeera: "It's better to be a medical officer in a system that works than a psychiatrist in a system that doesn't."
'No funding from the government'

In part due to the migration of doctors to other countries, Nigeria has an estimated physician-patient ratio of one doctor to every 4,000 to 5,000 patients - six times smaller than the physician-patient ratio (one physician to every 600 doctors) that is recommended by WHO.

Nigeria Health Watch projects that with Nigeria's population on the rise (it is slated to double by 2050, according to the United Nations), the country will need to stop losing doctors and instead start bringing more in - at a rate of 10,605 per year - to keep pace with overall patient demand.

Nigeria's former Minister of Labour and Employment, Dr Chris Ngige, said in April that the country had "more than enough" doctors.

But practitioners at Yaba - and their patients - disagree.

They say Nigeria needs to start spending the money it has pledged to devote to psychiatry services and other forms of healthcare, too.

Along with 20 other member nations of the African Union, Nigeria signed the 2001 Abuja Declaration that promised to earmark 15 percent of its federal budgets for healthcare.

A 2011 WHO report found Nigeria had made "insufficient progress" towards that target. And by 2018, the country had allocated just 3.95 percent of its budget to funding its Ministry of Health.

In Nigeria's recently proposed 2020 budget, President Muhammadu Buhari allocated just 4.3 percent of the total budget for health.

For the physicians, residents, and patients of Federal Neuro-Psychiatric Hospital Yaba, the money and support for which they have been long been waiting cannot come too soon.

"There has been an increase in patients," says Omoike, "but no funding from the government."

By Socrates Mbamalu

Al Jazeera

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Nigeria seeks anti-sexual harassment law after #SexForGrades film

The Nigerian senate has introduced a bill that aims to prevent the sexual harassment of university students.

The proposed legislation follows a BBC investigation that uncovered alleged sexual misconduct by lecturers in Nigeria and Ghana.

The senate's deputy president said he hoped the BBC's investigation would help energise support for the bill.

Senator Ovie Omo-Agege said that he regarded sexual harassment in universities as unacceptable.

If the bill were to become law it would be illegal for lecturers to make any sexual advances towards students.

And under the proposed law, which was read in the senate on Wednesday, teaching staff could face up to 14 years in jail for having sexual relationships with their students.

The anti-sexual harassment bill was originally introduced in 2016 but didn't pass both houses of parliament.

Critics rejected the bill because it did not cover sexual harassment in the workplace and included a defence for consent. The defence for consent has been removed from the latest bill.

Footage of alleged sexual misconduct by academics at the University of Lagos and the University of Ghana was broadcast on Monday in Sex for Grades - a documentary by the BBC's Africa Eye investigative unit.

The documentary prompted outrage over harassment in Nigeria and Ghana and led to the suspension of four lecturers featured in the film. The suspended lecturers have denied the allegations.

What did the film show?

Four lecturers were secretly filmed allegedly propositioning or sexually harassing the BBC's undercover reporters.

Dr Boniface Igbeneghu, a lecturer at the University of Lagos and local pastor, was filmed making inappropriate remarks and requests toward an undercover journalist, who was posing as a prospective student aged 17, and later physically harassing her and asking to kiss her inside his locked office

Dr Igbeneghu then appeared to threaten to tell her mother if she was "disobedient" towards him.

The full hour-long documentary also featured interactions with two lecturers at the University of Ghana.

Both of the men, Professor Ransford Gyampo and Dr Paul Kwame Butakor, have been suspended but denied they were offering "sex for grades" in the undercover exchanges.


BBC

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