About 60 of the 200 schoolgirls kidnapped escape from Boko Haram

More than 60 women and girls are reported to have escaped from the Nigerian Islamist group Boko Haram, security sources say.

They were among 68 abducted last month near the town of Damboa in north-eastern Borno state.

Reports say the women escaped when the militants went to attack a military base near Damboa on Friday.

The Nigerian military said it killed more than 50 rebels in a clash that night.

Boko Haram is still holding more than 200 schoolgirls abducted in April.

Local vigilante Abbas Gava told journalists he had "received an alert from my colleagues... that about 63 of the abducted women and girls had made it back home".

"They took the bold step when their abductors moved out to carry out an operation," he said.

A high-level security source in the state capital Maiduguri confirmed the escape, AFP news agency reported.

Exchange rejected
The BBC's Nigeria correspondent Will Ross says the insecurity is so rife in Borno state and the access so poor that it is not yet clear exactly how many of the young women managed to escape from Boko Haram.

Relatives of three of the women told the BBC they were safe.

Boko Haram triggered an international outcry when it captured 200 girls in Borno's Chibok town on 14 April.

It is demanding the release of its fighters and their relatives in exchange for the girls but the government has rejected this.

Last week three women were arrested for recruiting female members for the militant group, the country's military said.

They were said to have targeted widows and young girls, promising them marriage to Boko Haram members.

A state of emergency is in force in northern Nigeria because of the group's increasingly violent campaign to overthrow the government and create an Islamic state.

Maiduguri was the headquarters of Boko Haram until it was forced out by the military and vigilante groups.

BBC

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Patients dying as Nigeria's doctors strike continues

Three days into the ongoing strike by public sector doctors, patients abandoned in hospitals nationwide, yesterday, cried out that they were dying slowly, and prayed for God's intervention to settle the rift between the government and the striking doctors.

While Governor Babatunde Fashola of Lagos State appealed to the doctors to stop using strike as a means of fighting for their demands in the interest of innocent Nigerians, the doctors on their part accussed government of playing hide-and-seek with them.

Meanwhile, the House of Representatives has mandated its Committee on Health to urgently engage the Nigerian Medical Association, NMA, and Ministry of Health with a view to bringing the ongoing industrial action to an end.

Vanguard visited public hospitals in Lagos. From Lagos University Teaching Hospital, LUTH; General Hospital, Gbagada; Federal Medical Centre, Ebute Metta, to Lagos University Teaching Hospital, LASUTH, were lamentations as patients, who refused to relocate, have been abandoned to their fate.

New patients were denied admission, while elderly ones who refused to leave were offered skeletal services by nurses and other health workers not affected by the strike.

Seeking divine intervention

Some of the patients were seen praying for God's intervention.

At the National Orthopaedic Hospital, Igbobi, Lagos, patients stood in front of Accident and Emergency Unit, praying to God to touch the heart of both government and the striking doctors.

One said: "Our God in heaven, listen to our cry and come to our aid. Arrest the heart of doctors and government to end the strike. We are dying slowly on daily basis."

At other wards, some patients that spoke to Vanguard insisted that whether the strike continued or not, they had nowhere else to seek medical attention.

They claimed their medical needs were peculiar and could not easily be handled at private hospitals.

One of them, who identified himself as Clement Odia, and had been on admission since January, said he was not in a hurry to relocate to any private hospital for financial reason.

'Am going nowhere'

He said: "I came here since January because of my broken hand. You do not expect me to leave now because I am almost healed. If I have to go to private clinic, where is the money? Also, they may not be able to take care of my situation, so I am staying here."

Another patient, who spoke on condition of anonymity, accused doctors of aggravating his pain.

He said: "I know if government answers them, in another six months same doctors will ask for more allowances. No doctor has attended to me since yesterday."

Lagos NMA speaks

State chairman of NMA Lagos, Dr. Francis Faduyile, blamed government for the ongoing strike, accusing government of destabilising already established health system.

He queried why government should agree to make other professionals, who are not doctors, as consultants?

"Everyone knows what consultant stands for in medicine. What will a nurse or pharmacist be consulting? Do they own patients in the hospitals?"

Also speaking, Public Relation Officer, NMA Lagos, Dr. Peters Ogunjobi, accused government of playing hide-and-seek with doctors, saying the strike would continue since the government had decided not to listen to the doctors.

Fashola begs
Meanwhile, Governor Fashola has appealed to the doctors in the country to stop using strike to fight for their demands in the interest of innocent Nigerians.

Fashola spoke at the second convocation ceremony of the Lagos State College of Health Technology, Yaba, saying fatalities from such industrial actions negated their professional calling.

Fashola argued that those that invented strike in the Nigeria health sector did it for the sake of their patients not themselves.

He said: "Medical workers from the lowest level to the highest in the chain of command and team are like gods on earth. Only sick people know your importance."

Fashola noted that workers in other sub-sectors of the nation's economy were not satisfied with their remuneration, but did not hold government to ransom.

Reps intervene

Also, the House of Representatives yesterday waded into the strike as it mandated its committee on health to urgently engage NMA and the Ministry of Health with a view to bringing the industrial action to an end.

The House, in plenary, gave the committee two weeks to report back.

The House, while appealing to NMA and its members to call off the strike, also urged the Federal Government to do everything possible, as a matter of utmost urgency, to have the crisis resolved in the interest of Nigerians.

Vanguard

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Nigerian sent to psych ward for being atheist released and now receiving death threats

A Nigerian atheist released from a psychiatric unit to which his Muslim family committed him by force has said he is getting death threats for blaspheming against Islam.

Mubarak Bala, a 29-year-old chemical process engineer, said he is in hiding in predominantly Muslim northern Nigeria where sharia law holds and some interpretations deem blasphemy punishable by death.

"People are threatening me, I mean life-threatening threats," he said on Thursday. He said he was too frightened of drawing attention and wouldn't allow an Associated Press video journalist or photographer to come to his hiding place.

Bala said that since he renounced Islam and declared himself an atheist, he has not only lost the trust of his father and elder brother, but many friends.

"Most of my friends condemn me and tell me I am bound for hell and that in an Islamic state, I would be killed. Blasphemy is a serious thing here," said Bala, who describes himself on his Twitter page as an ex-Muslim.

North-east Nigeria is in the throes of an insurgency by extremists bent on turning all Nigeria into an Islamic state under sharia law, though half of Nigeria's 170 million people are Christian.

The uprising has killed thousands and increased tensions between Muslims and Christians in a country where adherents of both faiths are passionately religious.

Bala said he wants to leave northern Nigeria but first is trying to reconcile with his family, especially the father, two uncles and older brother who beat him up, drugged him and committed him to the psychiatric ward of Kano city's Aminu Kano teaching hospital.

News of his plight came through tweets that he sent on a smuggled telephone from the hospital toilet.

Businessman Bamidele Adeneye, who had been corresponding with Bala about humanism through social media before he was committed, saw one of his desperate SOS messages and mobilised help through the #FreeMubarak Twitter campaign and the London-based International Humanist and Ethical Union.

Adeneye said he has also been getting death threats. "I'm getting calls from people who say 'Where do you live, we are coming to get you.'"

But he said he would continue to help Bala because: "That man is intelligent, his only sin is being honest about what he believes."

He helped organise assistance from Kano lawyer Muhammad Bello Shehu, who said he had been preparing to take Bala's case to court when the doctors discharged all patients because of a strike.

"Currently Mubarak has said he wants to reconcile with the family before he leaves and we have had some family meetings, that is ongoing right now, and they appear apologetic, to a certain extent," Shehu said.

Shehu is seeking an independent psychiatric evaluation of Mubarak's health to counter the claims of hospital doctors that he has psychological problems, and family claims that he suffered a "personality change" that led to his renunciation of Islam, he said.

Bala's father, Muhammad Bala, did not immediately respond to phone calls and text messages.

In a blog, the father describes himself as a journalist and director general of Kano state's Directorate of Societal Reorientation, one of the bodies that enforces Islamic sharia law.

Guardian

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Africa's richest man Nigerian Aliko Dangote to build Health Centres in Nigeria

Africa’s wealthiest man Aliko Dangote has pledged to build 11 health centers in Kano, a large commercial state in Nigeria’s North-Western region, in an effort to ensure routine immunization and the general physical health of indigenes of the state.

According to the Daily Post Nigeria, Dangote, who is the chairman of the Dangote Foundation, made the pledge during a video conference with Bill Gates, co-Chair of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and Rabiu Musa Kwankwaso, Governor of Kano. The purpose of the video conference, which was coordinated from the Kano government House, was to hold a 2014 mid-year review of their tripartite partnership on routine immunization

In 2012, the Kano state government signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Dangote Foundation to support a free routine immunization exercise in the state. The MOU is a 3-year collaboration which aims at eradicating polio and on improving primary health care delivery in Kano. Among other things, the MOU makes for the provision of sufficient supply of routine immunization vaccines and other consumables, supports a free routine immunization exercise in the state and makes provision for the training of health personnel. According to the World Health Organization, Nigeria is one of 3 countries (the other two being Afghanistan and Pakistan) that remain polio-endemic. Kano, which has a significant population of under-immunized children, has historically been one of the most vulnerable places. In June, the Kano government recorded a fresh case of Wild Polio Virus in Sumaila, a small village in the state, making it the third case to be uncovered in the state this year.

Dangote, who is Africa’s wealthiest man with a fortune estimated at $25.9 billion, was born in Kano. He said he was encouraged to build the new centers because of the commitment of the state government towards providing better healthcare services for the people, and he assured Governor Kwankwaso that his foundation will work with the Kano state government to strengthen its immunization programme.

Bill Gates, on the other hand, expressed satisfaction at the level of progress the government had made on Polio eradication, and expressed his hopes that the government would sustain its enthusiasm in that direction even in the face of threats of violence.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has been actively involved in funding polio eradication initiatives in Nigeria. Among other things, the Foundation has a $25 million agreement in place with the World Bank to support the purchase of about 100 million doses of oral polio vaccine (OPV) in Nigeria.

Forbes

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Nigerian Laureate Wole Soyinka says Boko Haram worse than Nigerian's Civil War

 Nigeria is suffering greater carnage at the hands of Islamist group Boko Haram than it did during a secessionist civil war, yet this has ironically made the country's break-up less likely, Nigerian Nobel Literature Laureate Wole Soyinka said.

Speaking to Reuters at his home surrounded by rainforest near the southwestern city of Abeokuta, Soyinka said the horrors inflicted by the militants had shown Nigerians across the mostly Muslim north and Christian south that sticking together might be the only way to avoid even greater sectarian slaughter.

The bloodshed was now worse than during the 1967-70 Biafra war when a secessionist attempt by the eastern Igbo people nearly tore Nigeria up into ethnic regions, he added.

"We have never been confronted with butchery on this scale, even during the civil war," Soyinka said in his front room, surrounding by traditional wooden sculptures of Yoruba deities on Tuesday.

"There were atrocities (during Biafra) but we never had such a near predictable level of carnage and this is what is horrifying," said the writer, who was imprisoned for two years in solitary confinement by the military regime during the war on charges of aiding the Biafrans.

Soyinka, a playwright and one of Africa's leading intellectuals who still wears his distinctive white Afro hairstyle, turns 80 in two weeks. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1986, the first African writer to receive it.

A million people died during the Biafra war, though mostly through starvation and illness, rather than violence.

Boko Haram's five-year-old struggle to carve out an Islamic state from its bases in the remote northeast has become increasingly bloody, with near daily attacks killing many thousands.

The conflict's growing intensity has led Nigerian commentators to predict it may split the country, 100 years after British colonial rulers cobbled Nigeria together from their northern and southern protectorates.

"I think ironically it's less likely now," Soyinka said. "For the first time, a sense of belonging is predominating. It's either we stick together now or we break up, and we know it would be not in a pleasant way."

GOVERNMENTS LET IN RELIGION

Boko Haram's abduction of more than 200 schoolgirls in April drew unprecedented international attention to the insurgency and pledges of aid from Western powers, but violence has worsened.

Boko Haram fighters frequently massacre whole villages, gunning down fleeing residents and burning their homes.

Nigeria, amalgamated by the British in 1914, brought together often historically antagonistic peoples - principally the largely Muslim Fulani, Hausa and Kanuri of the North, and the Yoruba, Igbo and other peoples of the mostly Christian south.

Several regional movements have launched low-level independence campaigns that get little national attention. But Soyinka said fewer people were shrugging off Boko Haram's menace.

"It's almost unthinkable to say: 'well, let's leave them to their devices.' Very few people are thinking that way."

Attacks spreading southwards, including three bombings in the capital since April, showed it was not a just a northern problem.

"The (Boko Haram) forces that would like to see this nation break up are the very forces which will not be satisfied having their enclave," he said. "(We) are confronted with an enemy that will never be satisfied with the space it has."

Soyinka blamed successive governments for allowing religious fanaticism to undermine Nigeria's broadly secular constitution, starting with former President Olusegun Obasanjo allowing some states to declare Sharia law in the early 2000s.

"When the spectre of Sharia first came up, for political reasons, this was allowed to hold, instead of the president defending the constitution," he said.

Soyinka sees both Christianity and Islam as foreign impositions.

"We cannot ignore the negative impact which both have had on African society," he told Reuters. "They are imperialist forces: intervening, arrogant. Modern Africa has been distorted."

He added that while the leadership of Boko Haram needed to be "decapitated completely", little had been done to present an alternative ideological vision to their "deluded" followers, driven largely by economic destitution and despair.


Reuters


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