Editorial: Lifting the burqa on identity and ignorance

Where the burqa belongs

The matter of the burqa though religiously sensitive needs to objectively thought about in its proper contexts. A number of European and Western countries have promulgated laws or are in the process of creating legal situations where the burqa is banned in public places.

In Islamic countries where the chastity and dignity of the woman is presumably preserved by the total cover-up with slits for the eyes, a see-through net or grille it is traditional and customary for women to be invisible as recognized individuals and personalities.

In more conservative settings, the women would have to be chaperoned by male members of their families to be seen in public and their identity is derived from who accompanies them.

Western societies have no such customs and this type of extreme modesty is rather alien to the concept of individual identity and the representation of personalities.

Where the burqa does not belong

The face is the first object of identification, communication requires eye contact and people, especially adults have the responsibility for acting as free moral agents with verifiable particulars of identification to access all sorts of services especially those to do with security, law enforcement and business transactions.

It means such open societies just do not have the means or the latitude to accommodate these alien customs because it abridges human-rights in terms of having a clear identity in the public space as it disrupts the sense of security people have by facial recognition of those within their space.

The civil liberties advocacy for the right to wear the burqa in open societies that require facial identification as a verification of identity simply holds no water wear no alternative system of identification exists to verify a covered face belongs to a particular person, it burdens such societies with impossible hurdles and impacts on the sense of equality we all have.

Whilst the preservation of right to religious observation is apparently sacrosanct, that of customs that go against the grain of easy identification cannot be so. The burqa just does not belong in free societies.

Unhealthy burqas of ministers of health

Health ministers would be expected to have the medical health of their fellow citizens as paramount with the aim to facilitate access to good, affordable and accessible healthcare to all.

For all their erudition, expertise and organizational ability, we expect that whatever they do will attract the greatest commendation of respect and praise of their service and one can dare to hope that they would avoid being embroiled in controversy.

It was bad enough that a health minister in Nigeria did not see the medical emergency of fake drugs and substandard drugs being dispensed in Nigeria’s University Teaching Hospitals suggesting only his predecessor was directly addressed and informed of the matter.

However, when somewhat progressive countries end up with health ministers in that kind of mould, a greater disservice is done to the people who deserve better than that kind of cack-handedness.

In South Africa it was the health minister in Thabo Mbeki’s presidential tenure who advocated the use of beetroot garlic and herbs for the management of HIV and AIDS that she earned the embarrassing world-stage moniker of Dr Beetroot as the medical situation in South Africa was allowed to grow into an epic emergency.

She has passed but the baton seems to have been handed to the health minister of the world’s second most populated counted and the largest democracy.

Donning the burqa of crass ignorance

Whilst health ministers are entitled to their moralities and values, they are not put in their positions to preach to the adherence of some moral code and alienate others on grounds that have no professional or medical basis.

It therefore comes as a shock beyond words when the Indian Health Minister at a HIV/AIDS conference he was attending said that “homosexuality is a disease which has come from other countries.”

It is hard enough listening to people propose that an element of human nature has a particular racial or regional progeny in their quest for a sense of cultural purity but to hear such stuff from a health minister is really beyond the pale.

There is every reason to expect this person to walk the plank before their pronouncements validate and promote the persecution of others on all grounds predicated from a false and illiterate medical perspective, one can only be filled with trepidation at what might result from this statement in a country where the matter of rights are not as sure and in others where India is supposed to serve as an example.

We need to lift the burqa on this kind of intellectual arrogance which is portends to have moral underpinnings but is stark ignorance expressed by one who should really know a lot better.

Acknowledgements

The BBC news website writes about giving powers to the New South Wales police concerning criminalising burqas by reason of the fact that it hampers the identification process in crime investigation and law enforcement. After a BBC documentary five years ago, I wrote a blog about the Unhealthy directors of Nigerian Health and yesterday, the Indian Health Minister took on the mantle of Dr Beetroot of India.

Nigeria: The embarrassment of maternal mortality

Mother and child can be safe

Despite the opprobrium that it attracts and in some cases justly so, the subtext to the story the woman who with the help of induced conception gave birth to octuplets [1] is that they are all alive as she also is well and alive to take care of her babies.

Just over 10 years ago, a couple also through assisted fertilisation became parents of a set of live octuplets [2], one of whom died within a week of birth. This couple becoming the first of such an event in America were of Nigerian ancestry and received the best of medical attention that the 7 are healthy vibrant normal children today.

Their mother a few years later conceived naturally to give birth to a girl which brings the number back up to 8 blessings of joy – they have only recently been garnering public attention with the birth of the other octuplets.

Care is of the utmost importance

At my birthday just over 2 months ago, I asked my father [3] about when I was born and if anything, what I heard the most was his gratitude to a medical system 43 years ago that gave a 26-week premature baby the opportunity to thrive and become what I am today.

Last weekend, in Sagamu where I went to secondary school [4] and in a hospital where some 30 years ago, my terror of injections was so shamelessly viewed by many, a lady gave birth to a set of sextuplets [5].

Probably no mean feat and amazing in every case, the sextuplets did survive but a few days afterwards tragedy struck with the death of the mother.

This highlights a very serious health emergency in Nigeria where the country counts for 10% of global maternal mortality [6] deaths linked to child birth – Nigeria ranks second only to India which has about 7 times the population of Nigeria.

Lackadaisical attention to health

I have not been convinced of our government's handling that emergency and embarrassment with any sense of responsibility or urgency; giving that after a fraudulent scandal in the health ministry [7] last year, it took the best part of a year to fill the post of minister and minister of state with competent personnel holding the substantive portfolio.

Meanwhile, the lawmakers bungled [8] their first attempt at a health bill which had a committee of probably the most qualified health professionals sitting and debating.

I have written a lot about health and healthcare in Nigeria and it can only be that those who can afford it get shipped out of the country at any feeling of discomfort whilst the masses self-medicate with unproven but mythically effective herbs and natural remedies until they are beyond orthodox, traditional or spiritual help and consequently die of that pathogenic brief illness.

It should not escape the notice of the reader that the hospital that delivered the sextuplets had been upgraded to a university teaching hospital where presumably one would expect to find the best medical hands and brains but the subtext reads that two of the babies were transferred to the intensive care unit of a private hospital in Lagos some 40 kilometres away where their condition has improved.

It is an emergency

Whilst I can only commend the efficacy of the transport and stabilisation systems that allowed the babies to be delicately transferred to another hospital, the damning reality is how a seeming centre of medical excellence could not provide in totality the care for the babies having inadvertently lost the mother through excessive bleeding.

A few years ago it was another teaching hospital where fake anaesthetic drugs were administered to hapless victim patients and a minister of health [9] who could not be bothered by the health emergency this signified.

Can we get better people?

Then we have a minister of women affairs [10], I say this without prejudice and with no condemnation of what is generally acceptable, whose amazing profile [11] includes the main and only hobby of reading the Quran – with what that all entails about the rights of women, the child and its attendant health issues.

The CEDAW protocol [12] languishes in our legislature whilst they promulgate laws about indecent dressing as another unfortunate woman succumbs into another grievous and heinous statistic of utter irresponsibility on the part of our leadership.

This whole matter of the sextuplets must not end with the mercy missions of charity for the upkeep and survival of the children but it should go to the root of the problem which is the extraordinarily unacceptable number of women needlessly dying at childbirth – this is the critical health emergency that Nigeria faces today and it needs addressing urgently.

Sources

[1] American woman gives birth to live octuplets - Times Online

[2] Chukwu octuplets - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[3] Four before three, I am 43 today! [akin.blog-city.com]

[4] Remo Secondary School (RSS) at 60 [akin.blog-city.com]

[5] BBC NEWS | Africa | Nigerian sextuplets' mother dies

[6] HEALTH-NIGERIA: Little Progress on Maternal Mortality

[7] Nigeria: The resignation of Adenike Grange [akin.blog-city.com]

[8] Nigeria: The Senate Health Bill is rejected [akin.blog-city.com]

[9] Unhealthy directors of Nigerian Health [akin.blog-city.com]

[10] Ministry of Women Affairs

[11] Profile of Minister Saudatu Usman Bungudu [PDF]

[12] Nigeria: Women badly represented at CEDAW convention [akin.blog-city.com]

Pissed Dr. Beetroot stole my liver

A South African Maelstrom

It would appear I have pitched my tent in Southern Africa over the last week and not without reason.

Mr. Thabo Mbeki seems to have stirred the hornet’s nest and will come a-stinging without respite.

As the Economist opines in their leader of last week, Mr. Mbeki sacked the wrong minister by sacking the deputy rather than the substantive holder of the portfolio.

Much as been made of the relationship that goes back 40 years between Dr. Beetroot and Mr. Mbeki and that leader goes on to say that he has favoured loyalty over competence.

In-bred cliques

Indeed, any leader would want all his “Yes-men” to be competent, but as we have in the Bush administration where 150 of the staff are from the Regent University which was founded by Pat Robertson.

When leaders fail to make their teams a broad church representative of all spectra of the people they govern, they lose out on competencies that might not necessarily be prevalent in their nominal entourage of fawning admirers.

It cannot be said that this clique of alumni of what is essentially a Christian Madrasah have not influenced policy and skewed debate in on the hot-button issues like abortion, gay-rights, stem-cell research, the projection of American might and Middle-East issues.

In a stealing position again

However, back to South Africa, the gloves have now come off for both Mr. Mbeki and Dr. Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, the ailing Health Minister with the credibility of the president at stake.

A news investigation has revealed what might turn out to be a rotten scandal. Dr. Beetroot is alleged to have jumped the queue for a liver transplant whilst suffering from alcoholism.

This had better not be true, but the government has come out with a half-hearted rebuttal of this story being “false and speculative”.

Beyond that, another story emerged that Dr. Beetroot was convicted – not just caught and charged or reprimanded – she was convicted of stealing from a patient when she worked as a medical superintendent in Botswana.

Loyalty paybacks

What makes this story look like the ebbing before a humongous tsunami is there allegation that the President brought his office and influence to bear on the surgeons to approve the transplant for the minister.

In effect, leaving this liability of a Health Minister to thrive when she should have been summarily sacked years ago is about to drag the President into a quagmire he would wish he has the means to escape.

I would suspect there is more to come to substantiate these allegations with the other skeletons that might fall out of cupboards to embrace those not looking.

There definitely would have been others genuinely in need of a liver transplant not given to drink, that person has been sacrificed on a less than principled premise of retaining incompetence and ridicule.

Thereby, nepotism and outrageous influence peddling in a country shaking off the shackles of apartheid is about to tarnish the work of those gone before.

If anything can be learnt from this matter, it is that blind loyalty can sink the sycophant and the master whilst obvious competence does elevate the proponent and the master might just have to learn to live with it and the lesser satisfaction that they had the foresight to chose the competent person in the first place.

References

How a 'fourth tier' religious law school infiltrated the US Government