Zainab Shinkafi-Bagudu, is a Consultant Paediatrician and an advocate for women’s health, with a particular focus on cancer.
An old girl of Queens college Lagos, Dr. Bagudu obtained her MBBS (Bachelor of Medicine) from the prestigious Ahmadu Bello University Zaria then went on to specialise in Paediatrics and Neonatology in the United Kingdom. She returned to public service in Nigeria, and was confronted with challenges in diagnostic reports for her patients. In response, she set up the first world class diagnostic centre in Abuja: Medicaid Radio-diagnostics Ltd in 2009; offering solutions such as Computed Tomography Scan (CT), Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), Digital x-rays, Molecular laboratory etc. Slowly, she was inspired to start an NGO, the Medicaid Cancer Foundation (MCF).
MCF creates awareness on health matters, trains health workers, and funds the diagnosis and treatment of cancer patients in Nigeria. Over the last five years, the foundation has raised over 120million naira for the treatment and support of cancer patients.
Bagudu is currently a member of the board of directors of the Union for International Cancer Control (UICC). She is revered in the cancer space and contributes to national policy on cancer. Furthermore, she serves as a member of the National Cancer Control technical working group as well as the Cancer treatment fund. She is an active member and Trustee of FLAC-First Ladies Against Cancer.
Through her dogged advocacy leading other civil society organisations in Kebbi, the VAPP and Child’s Right Acts are now before the state house of assembly for passage into law.
Her Excellency has been distinguished with numerous national and international awards for her untiring work, such as the Silverbird man of the year 2017, contribution to women empowerment and children’s welfare by the National Council of Women Societies (NCWS) and recently from UNICEF for her contributions to Girl child education.
She serves as a Board member, Women at Risk International Foundation (WARIF), an organisation that responds to the high incidence of sexual assault, rape and human trafficking occurring amongst young girls and women across Nigeria.
Growing up
I grew up in Lagos. My early education, right up to secondary school, was in Lagos. My father was in the police force, and the security forces at various times. By the time I was born, he was settled in Lagos and we were not travelling around like they were doing initially during the war. He had lived in Enugu and I think at some point I did live in Ibadan as well. But we just didn’t go to school there. We stuck to Lagos.
Growing up was fun, safe, easy, we had very great neighbours, my neighbour Mama Dapo, was a very significant part of my childhood and it was all one big community. I dare not offend her the same way I don’t want to offend my mum. She had equal rights and authority over me, my life and decisions and that’s the way it was. It was a beautiful environment to grow up in. there were no fences between all the houses.
Education was fantastic, I went to Corona and then I moved on to Queens College. Most of my childhood friends from those days, are still my friends till date. Education was a very important part of our lives. We all did it together and went on to do different things in our various fields.
So, I’m very thankful. The summary of that is, I don’t underestimate the privileged childhood and upbringing that I had. I’m very thankful to God and to my parents and everyone around at that time because they were my formative years and it really helped to shape me into who I am today.
A lot of the decisions I made were not directly made by me, they were made by influencers in my life—my parents, and even my parents’ friends, even at the time when you feel that ‘this is what I want’, and I say it in the context of a lot of women that feel that women’s rights means that you must always say what you want, you must over rule the man and it has to be your way, it’s not so bad when you allow people in positions of authority, even if they are men, your husbands, parents, to make the decisions for you. At the end of the day, it always works out better. And that’s what happened.
Becoming a Doctor
I didn’t always want to be a doctor. The decision to become a doctor was made by two people, my uncle inclusive. I was shipped off to Sokoto to go and learn to be a good Hausa girl immediately after Queens College. So, there I was with my application form to become an economist or an accountant. The vice-chancellor looked at my results and said “No, we need northern female doctors and you have to do Medicine. Then, he and my uncle just filled the form and that was it, I didn’t fight it. I went home and I said “It’s okay, no problem, I will do it.” It turned out to be for the better.
Why your chosen are of specialty
Strangely enough, it was a man, one of my lecturers. Everybody felt that I should do gynaecology because I’m a woman and it’s in the north, so we need gynaecologists. During my house job in Zaria, all my lecturers felt I should be a gynaecologist, but I had this wonderful lecturer who ‘picked on me’ and every question was directed at me. He would say “Tell us about this”, and I’ll finish speaking he would say “go on” and I’ll I get to the end, after which he would tell me “You know nothing”.
So, I was determined to be a paediatrician. I like paediatrics but that pushed me on and I really wanted to be a paediatrician so that I could show that particular lecturer that I knew a lot. I am glad I did.
What did you have in mind when you set up Medicaid?
The foundation has been growing through the 12 years of existence. What we started doing was the diagnostic centre and that centre was running the well-woman test including the mammogram and then we started out trying to support centres and eventually from just talking about cancer, we started by having open days for women.
So, we started out supporting and we did more screening, and then we started fundraising to support people living with cancer, to support their treatment.
Cancer is an extremely expensive disease to treat and survive with. So, we tried to find a way of raising funds for them, which is why you see all our programmes either on social or conventional media, our whole aim is to raise funds though reaching out to collaborative partners and people.
We support patients. We’ve also done some capacity building, teaching the healthcare workers on how to carry out cancer screening, we do policy influencing. I sit on the board of the UICC. So, on a global level, I am able to influence and advocate for things that help us to improve cancer control in Nigeria and Africa generally.
Also, within the nation, I’m very involved at different levels. I sit on the National Cancer Control Steering Committee, as well as the Indigent Cancer Funds, which is the first time the Nigerian budget set aside a huge chunk of money, almost a billion Naira, for the treatment of cancer patients.
These are at both federal government committees that I sit on to try to improve the lot of cancer patients. In Kebbi state, we’ve done a lot. We have cancer control plan, diagnostic unit, we also launched an indigent fund on the state level and there are screenings and treatments going on. We have partnership with different pharmaceutical bodies. It’s a lot of work.
How important is girl child education and what are you doing to promote this?
Education is the bedrock of everything for me. You can go to school and not really get an education. So, education is all-encompassing. It is about your environment, your course of study, it’s about knowing how to interact with people and relating with them in the right way, and you learn. You have various experiences. It’s about your friends, your social networks and support networks. You learn as you grow along and it changes.
When you talk about the girl-child education in the North for instance, they are the ones in the rural areas that don’t get that chance, that are forced into situations that ordinarily they don’t know better; either they don’t want to, or they just accept at that point of their lives that it’s the best and not what we advocate for our girls now.
In terms of how bad the problem is in Kebbi, it used to be much worse. There are supposed to be 60 million girls out of school in Nigeria, but luckily, that figure is reducing because of a lot of intervention by all levels of government, civil society, and by other stakeholders that are involved.
What do I do for the girl-child? First of all, I try to be an inspiration and a role model for them to view and live their lives and realise that you cannot achieve a lot of this without that basic education. Some of them have to leave school at the age of form three to get married and they don’t turn out too bad because they continue with vocational courses. It is a reality of our culture and society.
What we also try to do is to support such girls to continue to have an education and a means of livelihood to sustain them. We have different groups like high-level women advocates, also, we have UNICEF-led programmes and I am the patron in my state. We have a group of very influential ladies in Kebbi state that go around encouraging enrolment and reducing school dropout rate.
We also carry out various programmes that support it like water hygiene and sanitation and menstrual hygiene programmes. I have a lot of partnerships with companies that enable us to distribute sanitary towels. One of the major reasons why girls drop out of school is when they have their menstruation and they are not able to afford the right hygiene products and gradually their school performance begins to deteriorate.
By the time you find a girl coming in the last five of the class every term, eventually the parents get discouraged and they don’t want to find the money to send her to school anymore and she drops out, they then conclude that it’s better to marry her off. She herself is not encouraged by her performance and this is all because of missing school due to menstrual hygiene. It’s a big problem across the world, not just in Nigeria.
So, we have those programmes and also empowerment programmes for women. I have a Kebbi State Cooperative Society which I set up but it is run by people in the state, we entered different MoUs with various multinationals companies that we get products from and the women are able to access it and trade and they also carry out various programmes.
My role is more like a supportive role that most of the First Ladies play. I don’t have a foundation that deals with girl-child education or menstrual hygiene. I work with the state system. If UNICEF comes and says you need to head our HILWA, I will head it, I will do different things and it cuts across all sectors.
But my actual foundation which we have for many years before getting into the government house is the Medicaid Cancer Foundation. But all the other intervention, I work with the state structure and that makes it easier for me because I don’t have to worry about how I’m going to fund my next project.
Cancer awareness, how far has it gone?
The point I’ve reached in this work that I do, I like to say that the women in the north who are your typical, uneducated not empowered northern woman, probably married or divorced with little or no income has no access to health insurance do not know the first thing about cancer.
I’d like to say that these women just want help. They do not reject what we tell them. They are not against it. So, whenever we have programmes and outreaches, they turn out en mass. What they want is help. So once you’re able to provide that help, then you find that it’s very easy to change the conversation.
Where we are now in terms of awareness? It is much higher than it was, particularly in Kebbi state because of the work that we have done. There are a lot of negative perceptions to what I do. A lot of people say to me, ‘oh, why cancer? Why not malaria?’ I’m like, you do malaria. I want to do cancer. There is nothing wrong with that, somebody needs to do it. Cancer is killing a lot of people and somebody needs to stop it and this is what I choose to do. And we have done it very well.
That alone is awareness. The fact that they are able to come and say, ‘why are you doing this?’ to me is awareness. They know about it, we must be doing something right. There is more work to be done.
VAPP Act (Violence Against Person (Prohibition) Act)
Both laws, starting with the Child Rights Act, have not been passed into law yet in Kebbi State, but it has been submitted to the State House of Assembly for consideration and passage into law. There have been several hearings with different stakeholders. Also, public hearing has taken place, they have done all their duties and we’re hopeful that in a matter of days or weeks, we will be able to see Kebbi state on that list of states that passed the law.
It has been difficult in terms of the law and jurisprudence, in the way the law is actually written, the fact that we have pre-existing laws, The Penal Code, The Sharia Law, and cultural laws. People tend to think that it’s just a cultural thing, but it is not. There are legal implications in all the northern Nigerian States where there is an existing law that had to be sorted out, and that has been done. You can see that the northern states are adapting the Child Rights Act as well as the VAPP Act. There is no leader or any person that has an ounce of compassion that will permit a conducive environment for Gender Based Violence (GBV), It is wrong.
Beyond that, we have to find ways of reaching out to the people in all the rural areas so that they can make use of the law. We have radio jingles with the Nigerian Governors’ Wives Against GBV (NGWA-GBV), I work with that group and we have a plan of action which we’re slowly going through. We have recently done a jingle that will be played in three major Nigerian languages and these are being shared to reach the grassroots. There are a lot of things that are going on. We’re about to set up our sexual assault referral centre in Kebbi.
Your stance and contribution to creating awareness on Gender Based Violence
I do so through working with the Technical Working Group Against GBV in Kebbi state, working with NGWA-GBV and through my own office, with partners such as WARIF and we do sensitisation at the grassroots.
I have another partner I work with championed by the wife of the Kaduna State governor and they also have a branch in Kebbi state where they have done sensitisation in local government areas, educating people on what to do and how to get help and avoid children being abused.
I work with authorities, the Hisbah, an Islamic force. We find that in our area, we have reported cases of GVB of about 568 cases and over 300 of them were from Hisbah. And from research, when you have 500 cases reported, the actual number is times four of that. That means the remaining three quarters have not been reported. They are in the communities either afraid to come forward or do not have the support.
So, one of the things we’re doing is supporting the authorities on how to respond to GVB cases properly. During the 16 Days of Activism, we were able to do a few things such as the Conversation Café, where we trained over 200 boys on being keepers and being more responsible and supporting whenever there are cases of violence; and then also, we had the Girls Café (another WARIF programme). We do quite a bit and as it comes along, we try to do as much as we can.
Healthcare in Nigeria, has the federal government been entirely committed?
No. the federal government, the state government, the local government…the answer is No! They are doing what is their best, I guess, but Nigeria is a massive country and it needs a lot more. There are so many issues that we have policies for that are not being enforced. There is no structure to look at these things. So many of our primary healthcare structures are dilapidated and they need to be brought up to a reasonable standard so that people will feel okay accessing this care. The government needs to do more, we as individuals need to do more. Our partners, foreign and national need to do more. We need to have proper health insurance coverage. Government has a responsibility to lead and once you’re leading, the others can fall into place. Federalism of Nigeria makes it such that what happens in Kano is a bit different from what could be happening in Kebbi. There might be a federal law, but the way it is domesticated or implemented in various states in left to the laws of that state. That has to be taken into consideration when it comes to delivery of healthcare and that is one of the problems I think we have. Opportunities are not equal; knowledge and culture all affect it.
Girl child marriage
You can’t just throw down laws or your way of life on people that don’t know any other way. Whether it is girl-child marriage, hospital delivery of births, or to stop seeking traditional healers for cancer, you have to provide an alternative.
If I go around telling people in a very judgemental manner, ‘don’t do this, don’t do that’, nobody will listen to me. We have to work with structures that are going to convince them, that’s where our royal fathers come in and community gatekeepers come in to convince them to do otherwise slowly.
Most importantly, the government has the liability and the contract to provide social services to its people and one of these social services is education. Every girl has the right to a sound basic education for free in Nigeria.
So, by providing the right atmosphere for the girls, the schools, the teachers, the furniture, these are things that will encourage them. The government does its own bit in that respect. It’s not ideal, but you will still see pictures flying around of a school in Kebbi or Imo with rain falling and so on but this is the extent to which our educational system has decayed. You will hear some teachers speak and you will run and hide. It was in Kaduna State that the governor sacked all the teachers and they all had to reapply.
This is because of the poor standard and lack of training. For the first time in Kebbi, we have regular teachers training. Improving the educational facility can really help and then you can now tell them not to marry off their children at the age because it’s wrong.
They will bring all kinds of things and tell you that the prophet said this and the prophet said that, it is not so. I have had lots of in-depth conversations with very learned people and there is no law that says that you should marry off your five-year-old child.
So, we try to provide the right atmosphere for them so that they can go to school and change their mindsets gradually and see that it’s not so bad after all. The onus now falls on the young girls to behave properly. The fact that you’re in school or educated does not mean that you shouldn’t get married at the right time, it doesn’t give you the license to insult people. And these are the things that make some parents in the north refuse to send their daughters to school. The whole of your village is wearing a hijab and you’re coming in hot pants, it can’t work. You need to work with your culture and then you will earn the respect.
Being an ambassador for Hepatitis Zero
Hepatitis Zero is a global organisation that appointed a few of us as ambassadors in the state. What we are trying to do is improve awareness and funding and help to advocate for better funding for the hepatitis screening and we also provide treatment for those found positive. I’m hoping that the global organisation will be able to come to Kebbi and provide us with the screening kits that we need and offer some treatment facilities for that. There is a World Bank programme that is doing it across the world and the aim is to try and eliminate hepatitis by the year 2030 and then also vaccinations.
Women empowerment
A mother is the basic building block of a community. If we empower our women, we are indirectly empowering the home which consist of the children and the husband himself and neighbourhood. A woman that is empowered is able to reach out and help all these people. By the time women are empowered, it would further strengthen it. We have the Kebbi State Cooperative Society where women are encouraged to form cooperatives, they access the goods that the cooperative gets. We also give out soft grants, we improve their skill acquisition by teaching different things. We recently had soap and perfume making sessions across the state with disabled girls. We have different programmes in place on women empowerment.
How’s Kebbi State handling COVID-19?
For us in Kebbi State, it wasn’t possible for us to go into a total lockdown. You’ve heard about the prices of onions, it’s a fallout of the COVID crisis and the reduction in the passage of these items from the north to south. One of the biggest places for growing onions in Nigeria is in Kebbi state. The second wave on COVID is really bothering me and we need to be careful.
We are just not taking it as seriously as we should. The government says no gatherings of more than 50 people, and they are hiring event centres with 500 people, why? There is no meeting that the government has that there are not up to 200 people. It is wrong. There is so much noise about a lockdown. I’m not advocating for a lockdown, but let us be strict about the laws that will help us reduce the incident of COVID.
We cannot just rush to a lockdown when we have not tried to implement the use of facemasks; there is no fine for not wearing a mask in a public place.
In Nigeria, people don’t believe. They see it as a money-making venture. It is real. This virus is mutating, so, is the vaccine that we are getting going to work? We don’t know. In Kebbi we did a lot, we trained the women on making facemask and sanitisers so that it can be easily affordable. There was also a health workshop for the younger ones telling them about various diseases.
But the greatest achievement that I’ve been able to work is the CSO group. We have 33 civil society organisations that are located in the local government areas and they are tasked with creating awareness, providing masks and temperature screening around the local governments.
Testing is not as much as it should be and that was why Kebbi was last on the list when every state was getting their own. Now, we have all our facilities set up and we can test in the state as well. The main problem is the perception from the people. They do not believe that COVID is a problem. I hope the people will be more careful.
Your opinion on Doctors going on strike
I don’t support strikes in any shape or form. I think that constructive dialogue will achieve better whether it is ASUU, whether it is JOHETSU, I think we should be reasonable in our demands on our system. When you start to strike over financial things, especially as a doctor, then you’re defeating the whole purpose of your existence and your training, which is morally wrong. If there is a recession, how on earth is there going to be a salary increase? It’s not going to happen.
Sometimes, the government gives in into this blackmail and they cannot meet up with it. It’s very difficult for the finances on ground to meet the needs of what has been agreed on, and as a result, again, there is another strike.
So, we need to be understanding as well. I know that they are doing it out of need, and wastage is a huge problem in Nigeria. There is a huge amount of funds that is being wasted on frivolous things. It’s like an organisation, if you sit down and look at your outgoings and become more efficient in managing your funds, then I think we would get more resources for people to be better remunerated like the doctors.
PPP
The private organisations are run more efficiently than the government and it has better ability to manage funds and to generate funds. Each and every private organisation in the sector has a responsibility to look out for the society around it. Again, government cannot do it all, but government has to create a conducive environment for those private organisations to enter into partnerships with its people, society and communities.
You do not expect a private organisation that you are levying all kinds of taxes on to want to do things for their society or community. There has to be an enabling environment for the private sector to exist. The government agencies cannot be hunting them. Then, multiplicity of taxes is another issue that private bodies face. You can’t tax on one hand for this insurance and you’re taxing on the other hand for this insurance. It’s a problem. How much is anybody making?
If the environment is better and we all pay our taxes diligently, then they can do more. They can enter into partnerships and pick the various things that they can do in the society and give back. I’m a strong believer in PPP, it works better than the cumbersome nature of the entire government. We need to look at that. The private ones have to imbibe that sense of responsibility of giving back.
For anyone wanting to visit Kebbi, what are your outstanding features?
The National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) says that Kebbi is the safest state to be in Nigeria. You have the least cases of armed robbery, and all those crimes. The weather is amazing, everything you plant there grows. It’s a nice place to go and visit or even stay. You have steady electricity supply and that is one of the big things about Kebbi. Our electricity supply is fantastic.
Join BusinessDay whatsapp Channel, to stay up to date
Open In Whatsapp
