{UAH} My schoolboy solution to mother and baby deaths in Karamoja - Comment - www.theeastafrican.co.ke
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My schoolboy solution to mother and baby deaths in Karamoja - Comment
Many years ago in my semi-urban primary school, we all had one major motivation to do athletics — a free lick of sparkling white glucose powder.
After every practice run, we would dash to the games master with our tiny palms out, demanding our share of glucose as a right. It had a cool feel to it and dissolved rapidly and oh so soothingly on the tongue. I still remember the light blue tins from which that lovely glucose came.
Those priceless childhood memories came back to me last week when television in Kampala broadcast a morbid story of deaths and more deaths in Moroto, the capital of Uganda's northeastern region of Karamoja.
According to the reports, babies there are dying in labour because their mothers are too weak from hunger to push. The Minister of State in charge of Health Care Sarah Opendi pledged to deliver food to the hospital to rescue the expectant mothers.
Immediately I saw the report, my layman's mind went back to the glucose spooned out by the games master at my school. If that glucose lick could make us jump after a tiring run, could it perhaps help the hungry mothers in labour push so that all those little Ugandans did not die?
While it is obvious even to my non-medical head that it is necessary for the woman to feed well from the day she conceives and even before, to the day she delivers and even after, if lack of physical strength to push has been identified as the cause of so many little Ugandans dying before they breathe their first, then an immediate energy boost at the time of delivery should not await delivery of foodstuffs from Kampala.
Being neither a doctor nor a minister, I am just wondering why people paid to think out solutions to prevent preventable deaths are not looking at such or better options.
Some cynics will be quick to blame the women for getting pregnant when they do not have enough food. Many of the people who would ask such a callous question are those in Kampala whose health is failing due to eating too much. So they should be forgiven for not being able fathom what little control a woman in a remote cultural setting has over getting pregnant or not.
Suffice it to say that it is cruel and unacceptable that after we ridicule traditional child deliveries, and justifiably so, and encourage women in remote pastoralist areas to go deliver in modern hospitals, we proceed to let their babies die because they have been starving. If an expectant woman isn't strong enough to push because she hasn't been eating well, should her baby be left to die?
I do not find the Karimojong women who get pregnant on empty stomachs any more careless than our sophisticated elite in politics who don't have medical insurance cover and burn over one hundred million dollars a year of taxpayers' money in treatment abroad.
If people in our health and finance ministries cared to think a little bit, they would take out insurance policies for the elite at a cost far lower than the hundred million dollars burnt annually on treatment overseas for the favoured few.
Joachim Buwembo is a Knight International Fellow for development journalism. E-mail: buwembo@gmail.com
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