Hope of better days may be coming for persons living with disabilities (PLWD) in Nigeria as President Muhammadu Buhari last week approved the establishment of a databank for them. According to the Senior Special Assistant to the President on Disability Matters, Dr Samuel Ankeli, who disclosed the development, the databank will capture personal information on all persons living with disability, less privileged and Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs).
According to current estimates, the population of Nigerians living with disabilities is about 27 million, while the IDPs number about 1.5 million and the less privileged also in their tens of millions.
A database for Nigerians living with disabilities is expected to provide a framework for addressing the numerous challenges they face on a daily basis. These challenges range from the emotional trauma occasioned by their circumstances to the actual handicaps of their physical condition, which denies them full capacity to live out their lives as they would have desired, and the social dimension of abandonment that is usually their lot. Yet these are Nigerians who in many instances are victims in one state of disability or the other, for no fault of theirs.
The initiative of the disability data bank is a progression of the long-drawn process of providing socio-economic inclusion for the country’s disabled. Under consideration globally as disabled are persons who face at least any of the areas of chronic impairment such as physical, hearing, visual, intellectual and vocal. In some countries (not Nigeria) an ailment as diabetes is also considered a disability. Meanwhile, as a result of the condition of the disabled in Nigeria, many of them face a number of challenges as well as human rights abuses such as stigmatisation, discrimination, violence, and diminished access to healthcare, housing and education.
Nigeria ratified the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) on March 30, 2007, and the Optional Protocol on September 24, 2010. In 2011 and 2015, the National Assembly passed the Discrimination Against Persons with Disabilities Prohibition Bill, 2009. The bill was eventually passed by a Joint Committee of both chambers of the National Assembly in November 2016 and assented to by President Muhammadu Buhari on January 23, 2019. One of the key provisions of the law is the establishment of a Commission for a data bank on the country’s disabled.
With the approval of the establishment of the Disability Data bank lies the more onerous challenge of implementation. Given the over 20 years of advocacy that yielded the present dividends, the implementation is not expected to be without challenges. One of these remains the administrative framework for the implementation.
The creation of a Disability Commission as a separate agency for the exercise is seen widely as unnecessary as most of the reforms in the management of the affairs of the disabled can be marshalled by several of the existing MDAs, which can have their statutory mandates reviewed to accommodate the disabled. A typical instance is the current issue of date profiling of the disabled, which can and should be handled by the National Population Commission (NPC).
Even the lumping together in the data banking exercise of the disabled and IDP with the less privileged constitute a recipe for confusion in delineation of who is who by the Commission. The IDPs are victims of in-country hostilities and are expected to go back to their respective traditional bases whenever circumstances permit. They all therefore, do not qualify in the strict sense of the letter as disabled persons. The concern of the data bank with the less privileged stretches the incongruity of the exercise to the hyperbole, as with the status of the country as the poverty capital of the world, over 60% of Nigerians fall into this category.
Hence for the purpose of making a success out of the disability data banking exercise, it should be confined to the essential provisions for the truly disabled, as designated by the United Nations.
