In different spheres of life in Nigeria, there are various challenges We face everyday at the hands of government officials..from the extortion of money by the police and road traffic regulators like Lastma to the rude way government hospital staff address their clients and sometimes neglect their duties on the pretence of been busy or following "rules"....many people had died as a result of this!
The electrocution of 22year Old Oluchi Anekwe, a student of the University of Lagos showed nothing has changed in this regard..Oluchi’s immediate elder sibling, Nkem – a practising lawyer – gave a vivid account of her last moments before the sad incident. The 26-year-old told Saturday PUNCH that the accounting undergraduate could have survived had staff of the UNILAG medical centre attended to her immediately she was rushed to the facility. She said they insisted on seeing her Identity card before checking her.
She battled to contain her emotions while pouring out her heart.
“Oluchi was still alive by the time she was rushed to the medical centre of the school but the doctors and nurses refused to attend to her until they saw her identity card and confirmed that she was a student. They refused to attend to her and that was how the girl died there. The most shocking part was that when I got there, Oluchi wasn’t even placed on a bed; they had wrapped her body and placed it on the floor. I told the doctor that it was wrong for them to have done that because sometimes the person could still be alive at that point. It was an indirect statement from them that nothing was done to save her life. Even Uju, our last born who was with Oluchi when the incident happened, wasn’t attended to even with the injuries she sustained. It was after I confronted the doctor for not being sensitive enough that Uju was only given panadol and one small tablet. This was around 8:00pm. You can imagine how long she was abandoned from the time the cable fell on them.
“At the mortuary at LUTH that night, the officials refused to honour the death certificate issued for Oluchi, insisting that it was not valid because the doctor did not sign it. He probably didn’t sign it because he knew he didn’t examine her at all before pronouncing her dead. The ambulance that brought us from UNILAG had to take the nurse back to get the doctor to sign the death certificate while the body was wheeled to a corner outside the mortuary. It was until about 11:30pm that her body was finally taken into the morgue.
“Oluchi was brought to the medical centre alive but she died because they refused to treat her. It’s a shame that an ordinary school ID card would be more valuable than the life of a human, a promising young lady,” she said.
Oluchi recently posted this on her Facebook page
She wrote: “Many are born great but die unknown…everything that makes us human is vain.”
It is sad!
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