SEGUN, MY PLUMBER, DIED
By: Deji Yesufu
I had some plumbing work to do in the house, so I tried to reach him. Segun has a terrible habit of forever changing his phone numbers. I have tried to explain to him in the past that in the modern day, the phone number is our equivalent of an office. “The kind of work you do is not the one that you are required every day, but the day you will be needed, your phone number is the only connecting link to you…” I will advise him. “Daddy, mo ti gbo…” (Daddy, I have heard). I did not particularly like the idea of him calling me “Daddy” but I have since come to grasp with the fact that I am no longer in my twenties and thirties – I am a lot older now, and Segun, who would only have been about twenty-one, could very much be my child. I liked Segun a great deal because he was diligent at his work, and he hardly complained. I promised him that as soon as I had some big plumbing work to do, I will give him the contract. For that reason, I enjoyed a great deal of rebate off his “workmanship” cost. Even though I often felt that he inflated the cost of his materials, but I did not bother to investigate it too much. That is the way things work around here: artisans like Segun integrate their “workmanship” into the cost of material – that is the only way they can get something meaningful for the work they do.
So, because I do not have plumbing works to do too many times around the house, I usually will not call Segun for some three to six months period. The last time I saw him must have been sometimes late last year. I had spent the better part of the past three days trying to reach Segun on the phone. He had taken to my correction and had stopped changing his lines whenever he misplaced them. So, I was convinced that he was only unreachable temporarily and would be available soon – perhaps he had been unable to recharge his phone. When I could no longer reach Segun, I called another plumber whose number I had on my phone. I did not even know who this person was but when he arrived, I realized that he was Saheed – a plumber I had used before I began to use Segun. I would learn, in the course of our interaction, that Saheed had actually trained Segun in plumbing. As we debated the cost of materials, I told Saheed that I could not understand why Segun was unreachable. Saheed looked at me with some incredulity: “Segun is dead…”, he replied. “What? What killed him.” Saheed explained that Segun had battled a certain illness for years. It might have been something related to his liver because it often left him swollen all over his body. He explained that the family had spent a lot of money on Segun’s health, and for a while it appeared that he was actually getting better. One day, some three months ago, he woke up gravely ill. He was taken to the hospital, but he could not be saved.
One of the downturns of a failing state is its inability to provide health care for its people. Health care institutions are usually at the primary, secondary, and tertiary levels in society. Things like headaches, malaria, and even child births are taken care of at the primary level. While the secondary level hospitals cater to conditions that are more severe. The tertiary hospitals, like the University College Hospital (UCH) in Ibadan, should cater to very severe health conditions that the primary and secondary health institutions cannot deal with. The situation that we find ourselves in Nigeria, however, is that the primary and secondary health institutions are almost comatose. So that hospitals like UCH are overburdened and are having to care for health situations that lower health institutions should be able to deal with. The Nigerian federal government must be commended for keeping tertiary health institutions functioning till now; if not for this there will be no health institutions for the ordinary people to go to. Even at present, people still patronize medicine men and other local and unorthodox health places – because they find government hospitals too expensive to go to. When we realize that the strength of a nation are her human resources, we will understand that catering for the health of our people is a duty we must do at all cost. Anyone can get sick, and when accessible and affordable health care is available, such people will get well with time. We owe our people the duty of ensuring that they get well.
The late Nigerian sage, Chief Obafemi Awolowo, in his book: “The Strategy and Tactics of the People’s Republic of Nigeria” wrote:
“Health is the foundation and fountain of a full and happy life. It is indispensable to every truly successful venture or enterprise. Other things being equal, the healthier a person is, the more productive and more useful he is as an economic agent and as a member of society. Indeed, we regard health as so paramount that we are prepared to give and do anything to secure it, whenever its loss is threatened… In order to enjoy full health at all times, we must do certain things habitually. That is to say, we must breathe fresh air; drink good water; eat food which is adequate in quantity and quality, and appropriate to our individual vocation… The government has a duty to every citizen to assist him or her to do all these things…”
Awolowo wrote this book in the closing months of the Nigerian civil war. He understood that soon the military would be out of government, and he was positioning his ideas for a working Nigerian society through that book. What Awolowo wrote in 1969, he had practiced in earnest when he was in office as the Premiere of the Western Region between 1952 and 1959. The Action Group ensured that two things was free to their people: education and health care. The point they were trying to make was that the strength of a nation lies on its human resources. A child who is born within the Nigerian geographical space, should not have to rely on the resources that his or her parent have to get an education or to have access to good health care. Awo, who himself had risen from very humble beginnings, understood that Providence gifts a nation with human beings and instils wisdom within them. Education hones this wisdom, while health care protects the vessel holding this wisdom. When, as the case is now, people have to preserve their health based on the resources they have, and also get an education in a similar way, the country loses human resources because the children of the poor will not have access to health care and education. While I am not totally open to a socialist ideology, as Awolowo championed in that book (because I believe that government should not be all-in-all in society – that is recipe for totalitarianism), I believe that no country can run away from some kind of welfarism for its people – particularly for the poor. At the worst, there should be a place for people like Segun to get an education and to get care for their health. It was probably because he could not get free education that he learnt plumbing; and while at his duties, his health failed and he did not have the resources to access the best health care.
In 2004, I wrote my mother a long letter, where I explained a lot of my challenges to her. Mother lived in the United States and she appeared to be able to read more into my letters than I wrote down. I think I took the art of writing from her – and those who write also know how to read. As I closed my letter, I explained a certain health challenge I had. I told her that I was trusting God for healing. My mother was alarmed after reading that letter. She told me to abandon all my search for a job in Lagos then, and head to the Lagos University Teaching Hospital (LUTH) for care. She sent me all the money I needed. I followed her instructions. I had developed osteomyelitis somewhere on the surface of my skull, and the wound around there had not healed in ten years. The doctors took me through a very minor surgical procedure – where they removed the surface of the infected skull and took it for testing. They wanted to eradicate every possibility of cancer infection. Thankfully, the result returned that it was not cancer. In the process of treating the surgical wounds with antibiotics, a ten-year old wound disappeared. If not for the quick thinking of a mother and the resources she provided, and the availability of a tertiary health institution, I would have been dead at a little over twenty years of age – about the same age Segun died.
Socialism is based on the idea that all human beings are equal – regardless of the station in life that we find ourselves. So that the resources of a land should be equally distributed to the citizens of that country. It then posits that government should be vested with powers to equitably distribute these resources. Most governments in the world are based on one kind of socialist ideology or the other. The problem is never at positing ideas; the problem is always successfully implementing these ideas. Nigeria is reverting to an age-old system where the rich and the privileged hold to power and reserved all the opportunities that society provides for themselves, their children, and their cronies alone. The problem with systems like these is that it is usually not meritorious, and the ordinary man would hardly be able to emerge from it to become somebody in life. This kind of system eventually precipitate violent revolutions that leads to the overthrow of the privileged and the installing of a leadership that will cater to the need of the people. Some of us are writing these things because we are convinced that society need not burn down before it can embark on necessary changes. The government that we have on ground only need to be faithful to the promises they make to the people. The least a government can do, both at local, state, and federal level, is to make basic education and health care available to her citizens.
Adieu, Segun, my plumber.
Deji Yesufu is the pastor of Providence Reformed Baptist Church Ibadan. He is the author of HUMANITY.
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