The Governor-Elect of Ekiti State, Mr Ayodele Fayose has joined other Nigerians in congratulating the governor of Osun State Governor, Mr Rauf Aregbesola, on his re-election as governor of the state.
In a statement in Ado-Ekiti Sunday by his Chief Press Secretary, Mr Idowu Adelusi, Fayose said he is looking forward to a working relationship between him and Ogbeni Aregbesola
The governor -elect noted that Aregbesola’s victory was a plus for democracy in Nigeria as it showed that Nigerians could conduct their affairs in peaceful and orderly manner
Fayose further expressed confidence that as the incoming governor of Ekiti State, he would have a pleasant working relationship with Aregbesola in the bid to move their states and the South-West geo-political zone forward
He, however lauded the Independent National Electoral commission (INEC) for conducting a transparent poll devoid of rancour despite initial fears in some quarters
He equally lauded President Goodluck Jonathan for championing the cause of credible elections in Nigeria and standing firmly by it
He also commended security agents for providing adequate security before, during and after the election and not allowing anybody to be able to foment trouble
Fayose reiterated his pledge to lift Ekiti to higher level and solicited the support of all in the task ahead
After an unnecessarily tense, tortuous and even traumatic process, the Independent National Electoral Commission this morning declared me as the winner of the Osun state governorship election on the platform of the All Progressive Congress (APC). On behalf of my party, we are delighted to claim victory for our hard work, focus and dedication in this election. I thank the Almighty God for our triumph at the polls, against all odds.
To the good people of Osun State goes our unflinching gratitude. We salute your steadfastness, courage, loyalty, commitment and fierce determination to defend your sovereign rights. You have demonstrated in this election that in a democracy, power truly belongs to the people. I am humbled and honoured by your trust and abiding faith in me and my party. I pledge that your confidence in us shall never be betrayed or taken for granted.
Ordinarily, this should be a moment of joy and celebration consequent upon the hard earned triumph of the people’s will. However, this election shows that democracy is still gravely endangered in Nigeria. We witnessed gross abuse of power and, of due process before, during, and even after the actual voting process. It is so sad and unfortunate that what should be a normal, routine process was maliciously allowed to snowball in to a needless virtual war by the Federal Government and the PDP.
Osun state was unduly militarized in an unprecedented manner through criminal intimidation and psychological assault on our people. This election witnessed an abuse of our security agencies and amounted to a corruption of their professional ethics and integrity.
The security agencies were unprofessionally utilized in Osun state to harass, intimidate and oppress the people whose taxes are used to pay their salaries and provide their arms. Hundreds of leaders, supporters, sympathizers and agents of our party were arrested and detained. Also, hundreds of other innocent citizens including women and the aged were harassed, brutalized and traumatized. In spite of this condemnable repression and abuse of human rights, the unflagging spirit of our people triumphed.
Our victory is due to the steadfastness and resolute determination of our people to assert and defend their rights. The PDP obviously did all it could in a most desperate manner to steal the people’s mandate. A critical analysis of the elections shows a trend of general low voter turnout largely because of the atmosphere of deliberate tyranny and fear caused by the excessive militarization of the state. Despite our victory, it is pertinent to condemn and also point out the fact that the number of accredited voters in most local governments was less than half of registered voters. Against this trend, it is curious that the bulk of Senator the PDP votes came from only four Local Governments- namely Ife Central, Ife East, Ife North and Ife South. This suggests an inexplicable large turnout in his stronghold which is a curious departure from the general trend of voting across the state.
The outcome of this election, once again, shows the unswerving determination of our people to ensure that democracy triumphs in Nigeria. We have sent a strong signal to all and sundry that no might is powerful enough to thwart the will of the people. This should always strengthen our resolve to ensure that as from now on, every vote must not only be counted but must count in this country. Nobody or party must ever exercise power unreasonably at any level except in accordance with the will of the people to whom sovereignty belongs.
Let me assure the good people of Osun state that I appreciate that this victory is a reward for our hard work and commitment to the welfare of our people. I promise that we shall not rest on our oars but shall be spurred to work even harder with all well meaning people of the State of Osun and the generality of Nigerians to continue to enjoy your trust and support. You can be assured that we will leave no stone unturned in our continued effort to transform Osun into a land of progress, prosperity and peace for all with renewed fervour. I realize that this victory and the challenges we went through is a call to greater service and sustained commitment to our people. I pledge a rededication of myself to the service of our people and the strengthening of democratic values in Osun and Nigeria generally. Our country remains in political bondage and we must set her free.
On a July morning nearly half a century ago, Nat Nakasa, a black South African living in exile in New York, plummeted from a seventh-story window on Central Park West and 102nd Street in Manhattan, suffering multiple fractures and internal injuries. He was pronounced dead on arrival at Knickerbocker Hospital in Harlem. Mr. Nakasa was 28 years old.
Just 10 months earlier, he had left his home country to take a Nieman journalism fellowshipat Harvard University. Because he wrote articles the apartheid government abhorred, officials denied him a passport. They offered an exit permit — a one-way ticket out of the country — daring him to renounce his South African citizenship.
“If I shall leave this country and decide not to come back,” he wrote in 1964, “it will be because of a desire to avoid perishing in my own bitterness — a bitterness born of being reduced to a second-class citizen.”
With key leaders of the liberation movement, including Nelson Mandela, sent to prison, and the government cracking down on writers, Mr. Nakasa chose the exit permit. In his final column for The Rand Daily Mail, “A Native of Nowhere,” he wrote of “taking a grave step” and becoming “a stateless person, a wanderer.”
Photo
His headstone, right, at Ferncliff Cemetery in Hartsdale, N.Y., where he was buried after the apartheid government in South Africa refused to allow his body back into the country.CreditJake Naughton/The New York Times
Less than a year later, he was dead.
The apartheid government wouldn’t allow his body to return home, so Miriam Makeba and Hugh Masekela, the South African musicians then living in the New York area, and the photographer Peter Magubane collected funds from South African exiles and buried Mr. Nakasa at Ferncliff Cemetery in Hartsdale, N.Y., just feet from where Malcolm X had been laid to rest five months earlier.
In the decades since, apartheid fell and Mr. Mandela became South Africa’s first black president. As the country has struggled to heal vast social and economic scars left by minority rule, a reminder of that wretched past remains buried in the soil in New York.
Over the years, journalists and Mr. Nakasa’s family have tried to bring his remains back to South Africa, but bureaucratic hurdles and a lack of funds have stymied them. Now, with the country celebrating its 20th anniversary of freedom, with the 50th anniversary of Mr. Nakasa’s death approaching, and with a 2013 biography generating renewed interest in his story, he is finally headed home.
On Aug. 15, Mr. Nakasa’s remains will be exhumed, and on Aug. 16, government officials and members of the Nakasa family will gather for a public memorial service at Broadway Presbyterian Church on West 114th Street. His remains will then be returned to South Africa for burial in September near his childhood home in Chesterville, a township outside Durban.
“This will hopefully bring closure to a horrific chapter that has remained a blight in our history for almost 50 years,” said Nathi Mthethwa, South Africa’s minister of arts and culture, who is leading a delegation to New York in the coming week. “His homecoming is the restoration of his citizenship and dignity as a human being.”
Mr. Nakasa was short and skinny, with a boyish, mischievous face. He never finished high school, but became a top writer for South Africa’s most popular black magazine, the first black editor of a South African literary journal and the first black columnist at a leading white newspaper. But the circumstances surrounding his death often overshadow his all-too-brief life. To understand how he wound up crashing to the pavement on the Upper West Side on the morning of July 14, 1965, is to grasp both the cruelty and the absurdity of apartheid.
“Nat is a symbol of what it was like and what it should never, ever be like again,” Joe Thloloe, a former colleague, said in a telephone interview.
Photo
Mr. Nakasa (fourth from the left, front row) with other Nieman fellows and an administrator.CreditNieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard
Nathaniel Ndazana Nakasa was born on May 12, 1937, the second of five children of Alvina, a teacher, and Chamberlain, a typesetter and a freelance writer. His parents, educated at mission schools, were relatively well off for black South Africans, but Alvina fell into a deep depression after the birth of their last child and had to be institutionalized. With his family squeezed financially, Mr. Nakasa never finished high school. After completing the 10th grade, he began to search for work.
His career started at Durban’s Zulu-language newspaper, The Natal Sun, where he worked as a tea boy and then as a reporter. He parlayed that into a job at Drum, a magazine that covered urban black life, and moved to Johannesburg.
“He came, I remember, in the morning with a suitcase and a tennis racket — ye gods, a tennis racket!” his colleague Can Themba wrote in a tribute to Mr. Nakasa published after his death.
Mr. Nakasa didn’t exactly fit in with his hard-charging co-workers, who liked their drinks neat and moved about the townships freely. He preferred his brandy with Coke, and favored the leafy white suburbs over the dusty black townships.
One way Mr. Nakasa could cope with living under apartheid was to laugh about it, to see the dark humor in it. He mocked the system by flouting it.
“Nat engaged in a one-man defiance campaign,” the South African poet Keorapetse Kgositsile said in a telephone interview. “In spite of what the laws said, in spite of the terrorism of the police, the racism, the mechanisms of control they had in place, he was going to go ahead and live his life the way he wanted to.”
Or, as Mr. Nakasa wrote, “We believed that the best way to live with the colour bar in Johannesburg was to ignore it.”
He dated white women, went to mixed-race parties, and even put an ad in the paper seeking a white maid.
Photo
An issue of The Classic magazine, which he founded in 1963.CreditNational English Literary Museum, Grahamstown, South Africa
“He was a rainbow man before the rainbow nation existed,” said his sister, Gladys Maphumulo, in a telephone interview. The author Nadine Gordimer wrote in a tribute to Mr. Nakasa that he “belonged not between two worlds, but to both. And in him one could see the hope of one world.”
With a sarcastic, biting tone, Mr. Nakasa tore into the irrationality of apartheid. He wrote of forced removals of blacks from their land, of a woman who hadn’t had milk for her child for three years, and a black man whose son was beaten to death by white farmers.
He profiled Mr. Mandela’s wife, Winnie, writing that “nothing it seems can kill her smile” — not even the banning order that prevented him from quoting her.
“The very conditions under which we live incite us to insubordination,” Mr. Nakasa wrote. “Just being African in itself is almost illegal.”
Apartheid marched on in increasingly draconian fashion. On March 21, 1960, the police gunned down protesters in Sharpeville, killing 69. The government declared the African National Congress and the Pan Africanist Congress illegal organizations. Political activists left the country or went underground, and many writers fled into exile to avoid being banned.
After Sharpeville, The New York Times Magazine commissioned Mr. Nakasa to write about the human toll of apartheid. In the article, published on Sept. 24, 1961, he described the evils of the pass laws (which required black South Africans to carry passbooks when traveling away from home) and the preposterousness of government-sponsored segregation, including signs on government buildings that read, “Dogs and Natives Not Allowed.”
In 1963, the situation grew more desperate when authorities raided a farm and detained leaders of the A.N.C.’s armed wing, including Mr. Mandela. With resisters imprisoned and writers silenced or exiled, Mr. Nakasa was one of the last remaining voices of dissent inside the country.
As Drum struggled to cope with heightened government restrictions, Mr. Nakasa turned to a new project. At one of the mixed-race parties he frequented, he had met John Thompson, known as Jack, an American who led the Farfield Foundation, an organization that claimed to support international cultural endeavors. The two kept in touch. Mr. Thompson suggested that Mr. Nakasa start a literary quarterly featuring black writers. He brought the idea to his Drum colleagues at their favorite bar, the Classic, and during the ninth round of drinks, The Classic magazine was born, Mr. Themba wrote in his tribute to Mr. Nakasa.
With a Farfield grant, Mr. Nakasa founded the publication in 1963, the first in sub-Saharan Africa to largely showcase black writers, and he eventually left Drum to run it full time. The Classic featured the work of stars like Mr. Themba and Es’kia Mphahlele, creating a portrait of black South Africa impossible to find elsewhere.
In 1964, Allister Sparks, editorial page editor of The Rand Daily Mail, the leading white, liberal paper, hired Mr. Nakasa as its first black columnist. But just as he should have been at the pinnacle of his career, the tightening noose of apartheid made it increasingly difficult for him to work and to live.
“Nat Nakasa was a black South African writer,” the poet Mongane Wally Serote wrote in an introduction to Mr. Nakasa’s writings. “That is a bloody combination.”
He was arrested while investigating farm labor conditions, and the daily grind of apartheid began to wear him down. “Bitterness threatens to swallow me,” he wrote in The Daily Mail. “There are moments when I feel like giving in and letting this country go the way of its choice.”
He applied to the Nieman Foundation, which awards yearlong fellowships at Harvard for journalists from around the world, and was accepted. Mr. Thompson’s Farfield Foundation stepped in to help with funding.
As Mr. Nakasa grappled with whether to leave South Africa for good, the government prepared to ban him. He was accused of furthering communism, according to a government file first cited by Heather Acott, who wrote her University of South Africa master’s dissertation on Mr. Nakasa. “He is known everywhere as an enemy of the ruling government,” a police report said. It is unclear if he knew it, but the South African authorities had been following him for years.
In September 1964, before the banning order could be signed, which would have severely restricted his movement and writing for five years, Mr. Nakasa left the country. “He said he was like a child when he first came here, full of excitement of being able to walk freely,” his friend Kathleen Conwell wrote in The Harvard Crimson shortly after his death.
Mr. Nakasa’s first stop in the United States was New York City. He was struck by the drab red brick buildings that “looked more like giant filing cabinets” than homes. Ms. Makeba hosted a welcome gathering, where Mr. Nakasa found a small but tight-knit community of exiles. That weekend, they chatted about politics and went to a club where they listened to Mr. Masekela play tunes from back home.
FROM THE ARCHIVE |SEPT. 24, 1961
The Human Meaning of Apartheid
Mr. Nakasa left for Harvard after the weekend. He would return to New York frequently, both to record his impressions of Harlem for The Times Magazine and to work on a biography of Ms. Makeba.
He arrived believing that America was not riven by racism as South Africa was, recalled Mr. Kgositsile, who lived in New York at the time. “I would try to argue that the U.S. was just bigger and a bit more sophisticated than South Africa and, therefore, more dangerous,” he said. “He would argue that I had been misled by reading too much Richard Wright.”
On assignment in Harlem for The Times Magazine, Mr. Nakasa stayed at the Hotel Theresa. “Harlemites are like the South African refugees who are desperate for a change back home, but remain irrevocably in love with the country,” he wrote in The Times on Feb. 7, 1965.
A Harlem shopkeeper showed him a photo of the burned body of a lynching victim with a crowd of grinning whites looking on. “I had never known such personal fear, not even in South Africa,” Mr. Nakasa told The Harvard Crimson.
It didn’t take long for Mr. Nakasa’s dream of freedom in America to be shattered by reality, especially during a reporting trip to Alabama for The Times Magazine. “There were moments when I wanted to bow to a tenant farmer in Alabama,” he said, according to Ms. Conwell, “because I understood the miracle of his survival. They took away his identity and yet he has survived.”
When Mr. Nakasa returned from Alabama in April 1965, he grew increasingly despondent. An editor at The Times Magazine returned a draft of his article seeking major revisions, but he thought any changes would diminish its honesty. It was never published.
Ryan Brown, who studied Mr. Nakasa’s life while on a Fulbright scholarship, explained that Mr. Nakasa had learned to cope with South Africa’s abnormalities, and how they even helped establish his identity as a writer. But he had no outlet to deal with the racism that confronted him in America, and it confounded him.
He found little respite in the classroom, writing in his final Nieman report that “the racial problem in the world is one that has emotional and personal rather than intellectual implications.” Mr. Nakasa grew increasingly homesick, with his banishment from South Africa troubling him more as time passed, the Nieman fellow and newspaperman Ray Jenkins wrote in an unpublished essay.
Photo
Mr. Nakasa at the Drum offices in 1958.CreditJürgen Schadeberg
“It became very clear toward the end of the year that he recognized he made a horrible mistake by taking this exit visa, and he deeply regretted it,” Mr. Jenkins said in a telephone interview.
When the Nieman fellowship ended at the end of the 1965 academic year, Mr. Nakasa moved to Harlem and found an apartment on Lenox Avenue, near 118th Street. Not much is known about the brief time he spent there. He was unemployed and his visa was about to expire, and his mood continued to sink. Mr. Nakasa had petitioned the government to extend his visa, but he was denied. He informed an immigration official he might head to Canada, and told Mr. Jenkins he hoped to go to Tanzania, start a magazine and smuggle it into South Africa.
He attended small gatherings of exiles at the homes of Ms. Makeba and the musician Jonas Gwangwa, Mr. Kgositsile said. Mr. Magubane, the photographer, recalled in a telephone interview that Mr. Nakasa incessantly walked up a down subway escalator. In July, he sent Mr. Sparks, his Daily Mail editor, two one-line telegrams saying he needed to speak with him right away, but Mr. Sparks had no way of contacting him, he said in an interview for a 1999 documentary.
Mr. Nakasa told a friend, “I can’t laugh anymore, and when I can’t laugh I can’t write.”
Two days later, Mr. Thompson, his benefactor, who was also living in New York, heard Mr. Nakasa was in bad shape and invited him to spend the night at his Central Park West apartment. Over a drink, Mr. Nakasa said he was worried — both about finances and that he was becoming mentally ill like his mother, Mr. Thompson said in the documentary.
Mr. Thompson thought he had succeeded in calming him down, he told the police, but the next morning, shortly after 9, a disturbance in the street awakened him. Mr. Nakasa had plunged out of the window. He “literally died of homesickness,” Mr. Thompson said in The New York Herald Tribune.
The police noted that he “jumped or fell,” and ruled the death a suicide, according to a report first obtained by a George Mason University graduate student. There has been no evidence that it was anything but a suicide. Nearly 50 years later, however, his family and friends cling to other theories, fed by their suspicion of the South African and United States governments.
The roots of their belief lie both in cultural taboos about suicide, and in the unraveling over time of the web in which Mr. Nakasa’s work and life entangled him. The year after he died, newspaper reports revealed that Farfield was actually a front for the Central Intelligence Agency — part of an effort to combat communism around the world via cultural warfare. Mr. Thompson served as executive director from 1956 through 1965. It is not clear if Mr. Nakasa ever realized the C.I.A.’s role in his work.
Ms. Brown detailed the agency’s interest in Mr. Nakasa in “A Native of Nowhere,” her 2013 biography of him. As the South African government clamped down on his writing because officials thought his words would foster communism, the United States government was funding it because they thought it would stop communism’s spread. The C.I.A. denied Ms. Brown’s request to review Mr. Nakasa’s file, citing national security, she said.
The South Africans continued watching Mr. Nakasa in America, according to documents, along with the F.B.I., which began monitoring him shortly after his arrival. An immigration agent in Boston suggested he would be “of interest” to the bureau, documents declassified at Ms. Brown’s request showed. “It’s important to remember that we as a country were not blameless,” Ms. Brown said in an interview. “Nat Nakasa came to the States and was not welcomed here by our government.”
For his family, questions linger, but more important is that Mr. Nakasa’s remains are coming home. “Whoever did something wrong to Nat or pushed him or killed him, we can’t do anything,” Ms. Maphumulo, his sister, said. “We cannot live on rumors. They cannot raise up Nat.”
The night of her brother’s death is seared in her memory. She remembers a phone call from her brother Moses, breaking the news, and her father’s anguished response. “My father woke up at night and cried, ‘Where’s my son? Where’s my son? I can’t bury my son,’ ” she said. “So we’re very happy that at last the remainders are coming back home.”
President Goodluck Ebele Jonathan congratulates Governor Rauf Aregbesola of Osun State on his victory in Saturday’s governorship election in the state.
The President commends the Independent National Electoral Commission and national security agencies for ensuring that the elections were free, fair, credible and peaceful in keeping with the avowed commitment of his Administration.
President Jonathan also applauds the people of Osun State who came out en masse yesterday in all the local government areas of the state to peacefully and freely exercise their democratic right, trusting in his assurance that all necessary measures would be taken to ensure their safety and the sanctity of their votes.
The President believes that the free, fair and peaceful conduct of the elections have fully reaffirmed his administration’s determination to positively reform Nigeria’s electoral processes.
The outcome of the election has also given the lie to the false, unfair and uncharitable allegations that measures put in place by the Federal Government for the Ekiti and Osun State elections were partisan and designed to achieve a favourable outcome for his party.
As Governor Aregbesola prepares to begin a second term in office, President Jonathan looks forward to continuing to work with him and other state governors to further improve the living conditions of Nigerians in Osun and other states of the country.
He wishes Governor Aregbesola continued good health and a successful second term in office.
Patient Zero in the Ebola outbreak, researchers suspect, was a 2-year-old boy who died on Dec. 6, just a few days after falling ill in a village in Guéckédou, in southeastern Guinea. BorderingSierra Leone and Liberia, Guéckédou is at the intersection of three nations, where the disease found an easy entry point to the region.
A week later, it killed the boy’s mother, then his 3-year-old sister, then his grandmother. All hadfever, vomiting and diarrhea, but no one knew what had sickened them.
Two mourners at the grandmother’s funeral took the virus home to their village. A health worker carried it to still another, where he died, as did his doctor. They both infected relatives from other towns. By the time Ebola was recognized, in March, dozens of people had died in eight Guinean communities, and suspected cases were popping up in Liberia and Sierra Leone — three of the world’s poorest countries, recovering from years of political dysfunction and civil war.
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A nurse sweeping outside St. Joseph’s Catholic Hospital, now closed because of the Ebola outbreak, in Monrovia, Liberia, on Saturday.CreditAhmed Jallanzo/European Pressphoto Agency
In Guéckédou, where it all began, “the feeling was fright,” said Dr. Kalissa N’fansoumane, the hospital director. He had to persuade his employees to come to work.
On March 31, Doctors Without Borders, which has intervened in many Ebola outbreaks, called this one “unprecedented,” and warned that the disease had erupted in so many locations that fighting it would be enormously difficult.
Now, with 1,779 cases, including 961 deaths and a small cluster in Nigeria, the outbreak is out of control and still getting worse. Not only is it the largest ever, but it also seems likely to surpass all two dozen previous known Ebola outbreaks combined. Epidemiologists predict it will take months to control, perhaps many months, and a spokesman for the World Health Organization said thousands more health workers were needed to fight it.
Some experts warn that the outbreak could destabilize governments in the region. It is already causing widespread panic and disruption. On Saturday, Guinea announced that it had closed its borders with Sierra Leone and Liberia in a bid to halt the virus’s spread. Doctors worry that deaths frommalaria, dysentery and other diseases could shoot up as Ebola drains resources from weak health systems. Health care workers, already in short supply, have been hit hard by the outbreak: 145 have been infected, and 80 of them have died.
Past Ebola outbreaks have been snuffed out, often within a few months. How, then, did this one spin so far out of control? It is partly a consequence of modernization in Africa, and perhaps a warning that future outbreaks, which are inevitable, will pose tougher challenges. Unlike most previous outbreaks, which occurred in remote, localized spots, this one began in a border region where roads have been improved and people travel a lot. In this case, the disease was on the move before health officials even knew it had struck.
Also, this part of Africa had never seen Ebola before. Health workers did not recognize it and had neither the training nor the equipment to avoid infecting themselves or other patients. Hospitals in the region often lack running water and gloves, and can be fertile ground for epidemics.
Public health experts acknowledge that the initial response, both locally and internationally, was inadequate.
He added, “A couple of months ago, there was a false sense of confidence that it was controlled, a stepping back, and then it flared up worse than before.”
Health experts have grown increasingly confident in recent years that they can control Ebola, Dr. Frieden said, based on success in places like Uganda.
But those successes hinged on huge education campaigns to teach people about the disease and persuade them to go to treatment centers. Much work also went into getting people to change funeral practices that involve touching corpses, which are highly infectious.
But in West Africa, Ebola was unknown.
In some areas, frightened and angry people have attacked health workersand even accused them of bringing in disease.
“Early on in the outbreak, we had at least 26 villages or little towns that would not cooperate with responders in terms of letting people into the village, even,” said Gregory Hartl, a spokesman for the World Health Organization.
The outbreak has occurred in three waves: The first two were relatively small, and the third, starting about a month ago, was much larger, Mr. Hartl said. “That third wave was a clarion call,” he said.
At a House subcommittee hearing on Thursday, Ken Isaacs, a vice president of Samaritan’s Purse, said his aid group and Doctors Without Borders were doing much of the work on the outbreak.
How Ebola Spread
A report in The New England Journal of Medicine traces the spread of the recent Ebola outbreak from Guéckédou, Guinea, to towns nearby.
MELIANDOU VILLAGE, GUÉCKÉDOU, GUINEA
NZÉRÉKORÉ, GUINEA
MACENTA, GUINEA
1
3
5
DEC. 6, 2013
FEB. 10, 2014
FEB. 28, 2014
The suspected first case, a 2-year-old child living in Meliandou Village, Guéckédou, dies after being sick for four days.
A health care worker from Guéckédou hospital dies at Macenta hospital after being sick for five days.
A relative of the Macenta hospital doctor dies in Nzérékoré.
KISSIDOUGOU, GUINEA
2
4
DEC. 13, 2013 TO
FEB. 2, 2014
FEB. 24, 2014
A doctor at Macenta hospital who treated the health care worker dies. His funeral is held in Kissidougou.
6
MARCH 7 AND 8, 2014
The child’s sister, mother and grandmother die. The village midwife is hospitalized in Guéckédou and also dies.
Two of the Macenta doctor’s brothers die in Kissidougou.
DECEMBER
JANUARY
FEBRUARY
MARCH
2014
GUINEA
IVORY
COAST
Atlantic
Ocean
Conakry
Kissidougou
6
SENEGAL
Guéckédou
Macenta
MALI
SIERRA LEONE
2
Freetown
3
4
1
GUINEA
Area of detail
Nzérékoré
5
Freetown
LIBERIA
LIBERIA
50 MILES
200 MILES
“That the world would allow two relief agencies to shoulder this burden along with the overwhelmed Ministries of Health in these countries testifies to the lack of serious attention the epidemic was given,” he said.
Guinea’s Monumental Task
In mid-March, Guinea’s Ministry of Health asked Doctors Without Borders for help in Guéckédou.
At first, the group’s experts suspected Lassa fever, a viral disease endemic in West Africa. But this illness was worse. Isolation units were set up, and tests confirmed Ebola.
Like many African cities and towns, this region hums with motorcycle taxis and minivans crammed with passengers.
The mobility, and now the sheer numbers, make the basic work of containing the disease a monumental task. The only way to stop an outbreak is to isolate infected patients, trace all their contacts, isolate the ones who get sick and repeat the process until, finally, there are no more cases.
But how do you do that when there can easily be 500 names on the list of contacts who are supposed to be tracked down and checked for fever every day for 21 days?
“They go to the field to work their crops,” said Monia Sayah, a nurse sent in by Doctors Without Borders. “Some have phones, but the networks don’t always work. Some will say, ‘I’m fine; you don’t have to come,’ but we really have to see them and take their temperature. But if someone wants to lie and take Tylenol, they won’t have a temperature.”
At Donka Hospital in Guinea’s capital, Dr. Simon Mardel, a British emergency physician who has worked in seven previous hemorrhagic fever outbreaks and was sent to Guinea by the World Health Organization, realized this outbreak was the worst he had seen. A man had arrived late one night, panting and with abdominal pain. During the previous few days, he had been treated at two private clinics, given intravenous fluids and sent home. The staff did not suspect Ebola because he had no fever. But fever can diminish at the end stage of the disease.
The treatment room at Donka was poorly lit and had no sink. There were few buckets of chlorine solution, and the staff found it impossible to clean their hands between patients.
The man died two hours after arriving. Tests later showed he had been positive for Ebola. Untold numbers of health care workers and their subsequent patients had been exposed to the disease.
Gloves, in short supply at the hospitals, were selling for 50 cents a pair on the open market, a huge sum for people who often live on less than a dollar a day. At homes where families cared for patients, even plastic buckets to hold water and bleach for washing hands and disinfecting linens were lacking.
Workers were failing to trace all patients’ contacts. The resulting unsuspected cases, appearing at hospitals without standard infection control measures, worsened the spread in a “vicious circle,” Dr. Mardel said.
Tracing an Epidemic’s Origins
As is often the case in Ebola outbreaks, no one knows how the first person got the disease or how the virus found its way to the region. The virus infects monkeys and apes, and some previous epidemics are thought to have begun when someone was exposed to blood while killing or butchering an infected animal. Cooking will destroy the virus, so the risk is not in eating the meat, but in handling it raw. Ebola is also thought to infect fruit bats without harming them, so the same risks apply to butchering bats. Some researchers also think that people might become infected by eating fruit or other uncooked foods contaminated by droppings from infected bats.
Once people become ill, their bodily fluids can infect others, and they become more infectious as the illness progresses. The disease does not spread through the air like the flu; contact with fluids is necessary, usually through the eyes, nose, mouth or cuts in the skin. One drop of blood can harbor millions of viruses, and corpses become like virus bombs.
Questions and answers on the scale of the outbreak and the science of the Ebola virus.
OPEN GRAPHIC
A research team that studied the Guinea outbreak traced the disease back to the 2-year-old who died in Guéckédou and published a report in The New England Journal of Medicine. He and his relatives were never tested to confirm Ebola, but their symptoms matched it and they fit into a pattern of transmission that included other cases confirmed by blood tests.
But no one can explain how such a small child could have become the first person infected. Contaminated fruit is one possibility. An injection with a contaminated needle is another.
Sylvain Baize, part of the team that studied the Guinea outbreak and head of the national reference center for viral hemorrhagic fevers at the Pasteur Institute in Lyon, France, said there might have been an earlier case that went undiscovered, before the 2-year-old.
“We suppose that the first case was infected following contact with bats,” he said. “Maybe, but we are not sure.”
Roaring Back in Liberia
Dr. Fazlul Haque, deputy representative of Unicef in Liberia, said that after a few cases there in March and April, health workers thought the disease had gone away. But it came roaring back about a month later.
“It reappeared, and this time, it came in a very big way,” he said. “The rate of increase is very high now.”
From July 30 to Aug. 6, Liberia’s government reported more than 170 new cases and over 90 deaths.
“Currently, our efforts are not enough to stop the virus,” Dr. Haque said.
He added that most health agencies believed the true case numbers to be far higher, in part because locals were not coming forward when relatives fell ill, and because detection by the health authorities has been weak. Rukshan Ratnam, a spokesman for Unicef in Liberia, said some families had hidden their sick to avoid sending them to isolation wards, or out of shame stemming from traditional beliefs that illness is a punishment for doing something wrong.
Dr. Haque said that the tracing of cases, crucial for the containment of the disease, was moving too slowly to keep up with new infections. Seven counties have confirmed cases, and the government has deployed security forces in Lofa County, where Liberia’s first case was detected, he said. But the government has given leave to nonessential employees in those areas, so it is not clear how they will have the staffing to isolate the sick. Some hospitals have closed because so many health workers have fallen ill.
Liberia has closed markets and many border crossings. It has said testing and screening will be done at immigration checkpoints.
But on Thursday, at a checkpoint staffed by at least 30 soldiers in Klay, Bomi County, there was no screening — just a blockade and a line of trucks loaded with bags of charcoal, plantains and potato greens.
Hilary Wesseh, a truck driver who was sucking the last drops of juice out of a small lime, said he had been stuck there for two days.
“They are holding us hostage,” he said.
A Desperate Call for Help
By June and July, Sierra Leone was becoming the center of the outbreak. At the government hospital in Kenema, Dr. Sheik Umar Khan was leading the efforts to treat patients and control the epidemic.
But he was desperate for supplies: chlorine for disinfection, gloves, goggles, protective suits, rudimentary sugar and salt solutions to fight dehydration and give patients a chance to survive. Early in July, he emailed friends and former medical school classmates in the United States, asking for their help and sending a spreadsheet listing what he needed, and what he had. Many of the lines in the “available” column were empty. One of his requests was for body bags: 3,000 adult, 2,000 child.
Before his friends could send the supplies, Dr. Khan contracted Ebola himself. He died on July 29.
Bayelsa State chapter of the National Youth Council of Nigeria (NYCN) has set up a seven-member Truth Panel to probe the conflict of interests in the council recently.
Chairman of the NYCN, Bright Igrubia, who inaugurated the panel on Thursday during the state management committee meeting in Yenagoa, advised the members to be guided by the national youth policy of the Federal Government and the constitution of the body.
The panel has Ariwera Obolo as chairman and Davidine Sorgwe as secretary. Others are Peniel Egedegu, Alphaeus Ayibaemi, Faith Konuga, Cole Goldworthy and Daniel Erutieyan.
Igrubia stated that despite the activities of retrogressive elements, the NYCN was determined to transform the minds of the youths in the state, especially in the area of violent crimes and other social vices.
He condemned the recent spate of kidnapping in the state and called on the youths to shun acts capable of endangering their lives, and embrace the laudable programmes of the council.
Delivering his stewardship report, he pointed out that the incidence of cultism in the state had reduced to the barest minimum and attributed it to Governor Seriake Dickson’s restoration agenda.
Although no case of the Ebola virus disease has been reported in Bayelsa State, operators of small businesses like restaurants, viewing centres and bars say they do not know any measures put in place to check the scourge.
This is as the Bayelsa State government has announced the setting up of a 13-man task force headed by the Commissioner for Health, Ayebatonye Owei, to evolve strategies as well as liaise with other local, national and international health institutions to handle any cases of the virus in the state.
When Sunday Independent visited some of such business outlets in Yenagoa, the state capital, last week, there was no extra-ordinary strategy by the owners to curtail the epidemic.
. Nigerian traveller in Canada shows signs of ebola
. How outbreak exposes division among NMA members
There are indications that some persons who might have had contact with the late Patrick Sawyer, the Liberian-American who brought the virus may be avoiding calls to turn in themselves for checks and further screening of their status of Ebola Virus Disease (EVD).
THISDAY investigation revealed that most of the persons who flew the Asky Airlines from Lome to Lagos had been reluctant to come up for test and contact tracing, a situation that has compounded the work of the Federal Ministry of Health and officials of Lagos State government.
This is as the World Health Organisation (WHO) yesterday in Geneva, Switzerland, alerted that the virus was spreading as Nigeria now has between 9 to 13 cases.
Confirming the figures, Minister of Health, Prof. Onyebuchi Chukwu, informed THISDAY that “we have 9 confirmed cases out of which 7 are alive and receiving treatment and 2 are dead including the index case.”
On the fears that persons who had contact with the late Sawyer may be hiding, Chukwu explained that “regarding contact tracing, we know the whereabouts of all primary contacts.”
The minister further stated that “secondary contacts are much more in number and knowing about them depends on information given by the primary contact.”
“And there is no way anywhere in the world, one can be totally sure that one had captured them all in the data. Currently, 139 contacts have been placed under surveillance,” Chukwu stressed.
Also, the Project Director, National Centre for Disease Control (NCDC), Prof. Andullraman Nasidi, has denied reports that Ebola patients under quarantine had been abandoned.
Asked whether the new life insurance policy offered by the Federal Government to all health experts and workers who intervene in assisting in the treatment of patients has encourage medical experts to lend support, Nasidi told THISDAY that “yes, it has increase and the response has been very encouraging.”
Meanwhile, the Director of Port Health Service (PHS), Dr. Sani Gwarzo, has debunked claims that the Seme border is still loose to prevent Ebola patients in endemic countries from entering Nigeria.
Gwarzo, who spoke to THISDAY in a telephone interview said there about 40 staff at the Seme border meant to stop and screen all those coming into Nigeria through that border.
The PHS director explained that there were concerted efforts to ensure all those entering and leaving the country are properly screened.
However, a patient traveling from Nigeria, who showed symptoms of fever and flu – possible signs of Ebola – was put in isolation in a Toronto-area hospital, Canadian health officials said.
Nigeria is one of several countries in West Africa that has had confirmed cases of Ebola, in the world’s largest ever outbreak of the deadly haemorrhagic fever that has seen 961 deaths and nearly 1,800 people infected since the beginning of the year.
The unnamed male patient was being treated at the William Osler Health System’s Brampton Civic Hospital in a suburb of Toronto.
“As a precautionary measure, Osler put in heightened infection control measures in the emergency department including isolating the patient,” the hospital said in a statement, released late on Friday. Hospital doctors “are working closely” with public health officials “to confirm a diagnosis.”
In addition to quarantining the patient, the hospital said it enacted other strict precautionary measures.
“To date, there are no confirmed cases of Ebola in Ontario and the risk to Ontarians remains very low,” said Graham Pollett, the province’s Interim Chief Medical Officer of Health.
He also said Ontario’s health care system “is prepared to respond should an individual arrive with symptoms that could suggest a disease, such as Ebola.”
He cautioned that initial Ebola symptoms “are similar to many more common diseases,” adding that healthcare providers “have been advised to be on heightened alert for Ebola cases.”
Another senior Ontario health official, Eric Hoskins, said in a statement that with the “experience and lessons learned from the SARS epidemic, our hospitals have sophisticated infection control systems and procedures … and are fully equipped to deal with any potential cases of Ebola.”
The worst affected countries so far have been Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea, but Nigeria currently has nine confirmed cases of Ebola.
President Goodluck Jonathan on Friday declared a national emergency several hours after the World Health Organisation called the epidemic a global health crisis.
Meanwhile, despite the US negative response to the call to have the experimental vaccine for the EVD, Zmapp, flown to the affected countries in Africa, an online appeal has begun to convince the United States Government of the need to reverse on their stand.
The United States President, Barack Obama, last Thursday dashed hopes when he said it was too early to distribute the drug, gotten from specially modified tobacco leaves, to Africa, rather, affected countries should focus on building a strong public infrastructure.
However, determined to get the US government to change its stand, a campaign has kicked off, with different people lending their voices to the call for the vaccine to be flown to Africa for the affected persons, to stem the casualty rate.
In an appeal published on USAfricaonline.com by one John Okiyi Kalu, a toxicologist and public policy issues contributor, he said the idea was to persuade.
Using one Obi Justina Ejelonu, a nurse with First Consultant Hospital, Obalende, as a case point for the need to release the vaccine, Kalu said the victim had only relocated to Lagos earlier this year to work at the hospital.
According to him, they were only alerted about her predicament when she posted it on a website (Igboville).
Her message reads: “I never contacted his fluids. I checked his vitals, helped him with his food because he was too weak. I basically touched where his hands touched and that is the only contact and not directly with his fluids.
“At a stage, he yanked off his infusion and we had blood everywhere on his bed but the ward maids took care of that and changed his linens with great precaution. Every patient is treated as high risk.
“Friends, up to our uniforms and all linens were burnt off. We are on surveillance and off work till 11th. Our samples have long been taken by WHO and so far we have been fine.”
Kalu said after her earlier message, she alongside 40 others are currently being quarantined at Mainland Hospital, Yaba.
He said: “She is still alive and spoke with me today on phone. But one of her fellow nurses has died. You can help save her life and that of about 40 others quarantined at Yaba, even though the situation looks hopeless.
“All I ask of you is that we launch a massive online campaign using the news and social media to demand that President Obama release the experimental drugs used in managing the American Ebola victims to the Nigerian government immediately.
“If we don’t do it, we will lose Nurse J and others. Obama already said he won’t release the drugs to Africans but given that American government is public opinion driven, we can make him change his mind if we try”.
As part of efforts to contain EVD, the Chairman of Mushin Local Government, Hon Olatunde Adepitan, has appealed to the residents of his area to take the deadly Ebola virus as real and deadly.
Speaking through the Council Manager, Mr. Rasaq Oladeji, at the public enlightenment campaign on the danger posed by Ebola to Nigerians, he stressed the need for the residents to take precautionary measures on issues that can promote the attack and spread of the virus.
Mushin has been mentioned as one of the local governments where the people that had contact with the effected person reside. These therefore call for caution and vigilance.
It also emerged that following the Ebola outbreak, it has exposed the division and acrimony that have characterised the Nigerian Medical Association (NMA) in recent weeks, THISDAY has learnt.
With the increased number of Nigerians who have been infected as a result of late Patrick Sawyer visit to Nigeria, hopes were raised about the possibility of the one month doctors’ strike being called off.
As a fallout of the logjam over the decision to suspend the one month strike or maintain the status quo in order to address the Ebola outbreak, President of NMA, Dr. Kayode Obembe, Thursday resigned from his post, amid controversy which trailed the decision.
Obembe, who was not available for confirmation, however wrote to affiliates organs of the NMA resigning his post as President. He was said to be in full support for the call-off of the strike given the Ebola outbreak, a position that did not go down well most of the NMA executives, ex-officials and senior members of the association.
But few hours after Obembe’s letter, the NMA’s Secretary General, Adewunmi Anayaki, in a dramatic twist allegedly forward a letter to the affiliate organs asking them to ignore Obembe’s resignation.
Commenting on the resignation, a doctor who did not want his name in print stated that “he has to resign because he will not enjoy the respect of other doctors in the country. The controversy of the suspension of the strike has put him in bad light with his executives and other stakeholders in the NMA and therefore, he has to resign to save his face.”
However, Niger State Government has established three containment centres and an Ebola quarantine centre as part of measures to check the spread of the virus.
The Commissioner for Information and Strategy, Mallam Danladi Ndayebo, who made this known to journalists in Minna said the state Government has already commenced checking of movement of persons across its border.
Ndayebo said the state government would be working in collaboration with the Nigeria Immigration Service to check the movement of persons across its border to avoid the spread of the virus to the state, adding that the state shares borders with Benin Republic.
He further disclosed that the state governor has constituted a six-man committee made up of the Commissioner of Health, Commissioner of Information, Commissioner of Livestock and Fisheries, Commissioner of Water Resources, Commissioner of Planning and the Director General of the State Agency for the Control of HIV/AIDS (SACA).
Minister of Niger Delta Affairs, Dr. Steve Oru
The Minister of Niger Delta Affairs, Dr. Steve Oru, has re-assured Nigerians that the East-West road would be completed before the end of the year.
Oru gave the assurance in Takum, Taraba, yesterday where he attended the 60th birthday celebration of the Minister of State for Niger Delta Affairs, Mr. Darius Ishaku.
He said in an interview with the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) that the road still remained the flagship project of the Ministry of Niger Delta Affairs.
Oru said the Federal Government had pushed more money into the project beyond its budget through SURE-P and African Development Bank (AfDB).
He said the ministry expected $150 million from the AfDB and $20 billion from SURE-P to fast-track the completion of the road by December.
“By January 2015, the road must have been completed and put into use to facilitate economic activities in the region. My strategy towards ensuring the realisation of this project by the end of this year is to ensure that the contractors handling the job are all paid effectively so as to meet up with time.
“I have also assured the contractors handling the job that money will be released to them through PPP (public Private Partnership) and SURE-P to facilitate the completion of the job,” Oru said.
The minister said his administration would work to achieve rapid development in the region. NAN recalls that Ishaku as Supervising Minister of the ministry, said 70 per cent of job on the project had been executed after an assessment of work by the contractors.
He said the Federal Government had committed N248 billion by March with funds drawn from the ministry’s annual budget, SURE-P and AfDB loan.
He said the ministry had obtained a $300 million loan from AfDB and that 50 per cent of the loan was released and committed to the 2013 financial year and that the balance would be released within the year.
Rauf Aregbesola of the All Progressives Congress [APC] has won Saturday’s governorship election in Osun State.
To emerge winner of the election contested by 20 political parties, Mr. Aregbesola polled a total of 394,684 votes, winning the highest number of votes in 22 of the 30 Local Government Areas of the
state.
His closest challenger, Iyiola Omisore of the Peoples Democratic
Party [PDP], polled 292,747 votes to come second. He won in eight
local government areas.
The candidate of the Labour Party [LP], Fatai Akinbade, received a
paltry 8,898 votes to come a distant third.
Mr. Aregbesola won in Ayedade, Ifelodun, Ede North, Ola Oluwa, Irepodun, Ila Orangun, Ede South, Atakumosa West, Oriade, Orolu, Boripe and Ilesa West.
The APC candidate also prevailed at Ilesa East, Ifedayo, Irewole, Obokun, Egbedore, Iwo, Osogbo, Olorunda, Atakumosa East and Ejigbo.
Mr. Omisore on his part won in Isokan, Ife North, Ife East, Ife Central, Odo Otin, Boluwaduro, Ayedire and Ife South.
The Chief Returning Officer for the election, Professor Bamidele Omole, the vice chancellor of the Obafemi Awolowo University, will in the next few minutes declare Mr. Aregbesola the winner of the election.
Sayelba Times 