It’s a rainy Wednesday morning and I am at my favourite place in the whole wide world- Nope, it’s not my bed, not in my cozy living room or in the warm embrace of my family- its in the clinic, where I do what I do best, which is solving people’s problems.
On this day, while working, I am distracted by one of the hospital attendants’ who is outside my window cleaning the glass. Through the glass, I observe him quietly. He seemed to have lost a lot of weight. His once chubby face has grown lean with prominent facial bones sticking out. The skin of his neck is sagging, and I notice his limbs are thinner than usual. I call him in for a chat.
Are you ill? I enquired. He replied in the negative. I asked the usual questions related to weight loss- cough, fever, diarrhoea, etc and the answers were all ‘no’. Then why have you lost weight? I asked persistently. With a salary of N20,000, he now walks over 10km (to and fro) to work daily as he can no longer afford transport fair. Food has become a luxury- he and his family (a wife and three children) only eat twice a day. Breakfast is delayed till around 10am and consists of Kosai and kunu or just kunu, while dinner is at 5pm and is usually tuwo and kuka soup. Occasionally (at the beginning of the month), they eat rice. During the school term, the children go to school hungry and rely heavily on the free school feeding program provided in government schools.
On days when they cannot afford to eat rice or tuwo for dinner, the wife treks to a nearby village where women like her pick a type of leaf called ‘Tafasa’ (Senna Tora). The plant grows wild in most of the tropics and is considered a weed in many places. When the plant is not available, his wife usually buys it at N200 per bowl and then takes it home to prepare it. The leaves are washed and a mixed with oil, maggi and pepper and consumed as a local salad.
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Those who have eaten this leaf attest to its foul taste. No amount of maggi and pepper can mask its horrible taste. It is eaten solely to subdue pangs of hunger. In the absence of Tafasa, there is another leaf called ‘Rai dore’ (Coffee senna), another shrub that grows as an aggressive pantropical weed. This weed is, if possible, even more unpleasant to the tastebuds.
By the time he left my office, I was thoroughly humbled.
Alas, there was still more to come. At home, my driver brought his neighbour’s daughter to me. The fingers on her left hand were bent at an abnormal angle pathognomonic of tetany. In simpler terms- she suffered from dangerously low calcium levels. I sent her to the hospital where she was admitted and given IV calcium. Again, I foolishly asked- how does a 22 year lady suffer from low calcium levels? Her husband just shook his head. For days, they were only feeding of the back of watermelons.
The back of what?
Yes, the striped, green back of watermelons, also called the rind, that we peel off to get to the juicy red fruit is what is being sold (not freely given) for peanuts to people who are desperately hungry. The rind which, is surprisingly said to be nutritious, is what they had been consuming for weeks and had led her to develop micronutrient deficiency.
This is in 2024.
An estimated 20% of the population is undernourished in Africa, with 57 million more people facing hunger since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Hunger trends in Africa show that the progress made over the past decades has abruptly reversed. After a prolonged improvement period since 2000, hunger significantly worsened between 2019 and 2022.
According to a forecast by World Vision, in West and Central Africa, 49.5 million people may go hungry by August 2024, with coastal areas hardest hit. Conflict, extreme weather events, and high prices are significant drivers of food insecurity in the region. Funding shortages have strained aid efforts, threatening a greater risk of child malnutrition.
Its August 2024 and the forecast has manifested in real time. Floods have ravaged farmlands in northern Nigeria and the fear of kidnapping is preventing people from going to their farms. And as if that is not enough- the rising cost of food has driven people (children and adults alike) to the brink of starvation so much so that they are now eating weeds.
And yet our president has just bought a new plane, a yacht and is currently renovating his Lagos Palace.
I remember singing the song “We are the world” a charity single originally recorded by the supergroup USA for Africa in 1985. It was written by Michael Jackson and Lionel Richie and produced by Quincy Jon. As a child, I enjoyed the song only because of its beauty, not minding the reason for its release. Later, I would learn that the organization provided food and relief aid for the 1983–1985 famine in Ethiopia, which killed about one million people.
Who will sing for us now? Who will save us now?
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