Mr Jamie Drummond, Executive Director ONE, an NGO, said that about 58,000
Nigerian infants were being infected with preventable and treatable diseases,
including HIV, from their mothers yearly.
Drummond said this on Monday in an interview with the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) inAbuja .
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Drummond said this on Monday in an interview with the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) in
He noted that many maternal and child mortality occurred in the country
resulting from lack of good governance and adequate data to prioritise the
health sector.
“One child in every seven in the world who dies of preventable, treatable
diseases every year in the whole world is a Nigerian child.
“One out of seven mothers who dies anywhere in the world is a Nigerian
mother and every year 58,000 Nigerian infants catch HIV from their mothers who
love them because they didn’t get the drugs to stop the transmission of HIV
from mother to child.
“These are completely treatable, preventable things and Nigeria has the
resources to stop all of these from happening with good governance dependent on
good data and accountability,” said Drummond.
According to him, Nigerians need to demand good governance, promote the
fight against corruption and encourage the existence of high profile data to
utilise the country’s resources wisely.
He further added that the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) would
require more funding and political space to enable the bureau to achieve its
objectives.
“The people of Nigeria
need to demand good governance, every single person in Nigeria says
the same thing; they need to demand the promotion of the fight against corruption,
transparency and good governance.
“When you have transparency and good governance everything else goes
better, when you don’t have that, you cannot say that the most important thing
is health or agriculture.
“If someone should weigh the magic wound, to provide more political space
for the National Bureau of Statistics, provide more funding for it and allow it
more independence, I think that can change things,” he said.
Besides, Drummond said that the relevant authorities needed to monitor
the implementation of the budget.
He said: “Journalists and relevant stakeholders need to follow the budget
because they are activists about facts.
“But they cannot do that if the budgets are not open and if they can’t
get statistics of what that money have been spent on and after a while people
lose the focus of asking questions about following the money.
“Demanding to follow the money and for better governance is the way to
improve the lives of the people, so that the money in the health sector will be
better spent,’’ said the executive director.
However, he observed that Nigeria
had the manpower and entrepreneurs that could work effectively to ensure
adequate keeping of data.
Source: NAN
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