News Africa Extended

News Africa Extended

The fate of Sierra Leone’s young mothers

Posted: 11 May 2016 02:28 AM PDT

Health workers in Sierra Leone are battling a teenage pregnancy epidemic that peaked when the Ebola crisis was at its height.

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Freetown - Dizzy and sweating, 15-year-old Isatu Koroma sits with her eyes closed in the maternity ward in Sierra Leone where she has spent the last 10 days, as her tiny little daughter begins to cry.

Koroma badly needs blood after a complicated delivery - relatives are expected to donate here but none has visited, also leaving the nurses to pay for her to eat.

Health workers in the west African country are battling a teenage pregnancy epidemic that peaked when the Ebola crisis was at its height late in 2014, and they say it shows no sign of slowing.

Ward sister Josephine Samba describes the girl's pregnancy as “an accident”, whispering that Koroma's own mother died two months after she was born as she cajoles her into breastfeeding the as yet unnamed baby.

Schoolgirls are so regularly admitted to Princess Christian Maternity Hospital (PCMH) in Freetown that they attract little attention.

Coyness about discussing sex in Sierra Leone veils the fact that during the chaos of the Ebola crisis many teenagers were raped or forced to have sex for money to contribute to household expenses, according to research by several children's charities and UN agencies.

“There were a lot more (teen pregnancies) during the Ebola breakout. Most of them were at home. There was no school, so everything was just upside down,” Samba says.

After Sierra Leone announced its first Ebola cases in May 2014, schools were closed and movement severely restricted, leaving girls more vulnerable to abuse.

Since then the UN Population Fund (UNFPA) has counted more than 18 000 teenage pregnancies, with the number of pregnant girls up by 65 percent in certain districts.

Internationally recognised as the country with the world's highest maternal mortality rate, at 1 360 deaths per 100 000 live births, Sierra Leone could ill afford the blow to its health system that Ebola dealt, diverting resources and staff away from maternal health.

The result is thousands of girls who will never live to become women, as UNFPA estimates that 40 percent of all maternal deaths occur among those under 18.

A lack of birth control and conservative abortion laws mean that many girls, upon realising they are pregnant and fearing they will be forced to drop out of school, attempt to abort with drugs or seek out backstreet providers who employ methods such as bicycle spokes to terminate pregnancies.

Louise Nordstrom, a Swedish midwife working on a UNFPA training programme for birth attendants at the hospital, described a recent, typical case of a young student who arrived at PCMH with severe stomach pains.

“You could see she was in agony. I asked her if she knew she was pregnant,” Nordstrom said, keeping one eye on a screaming woman waiting to be taken to theatre for an emergency caesarian section.

“Soon after she went to pee in a bed pan and out came the dead foetus. It was very obvious she had been taking some drugs at home; she knew she was pregnant; she was afraid and didn't want to have the baby so she induced an abortion herself.”

Many girls wait until it's far too late before seeking hospital care, says Alimamy Philip Koroma (no relation to the teenage mother), one of Sierra Leone's pre-eminent obstetric and gynaecology specialists.

“Some of them don't even come to the antenatal clinic, they stay at home because of fear of their (school) colleagues seeing them,” he told AFP.

“Sometimes their pelvis is not prepared enough to have a child,” he said, also referring to haemorrhage and septicaemia as particular risks for girls arriving after attempting unsafe abortions.

In this difficult context, Mohammed El Hassein, reproductive health specialist at UNFPA, said the three priorities were to improve progress in the uptake of family planning, bolster the image of midwives and ensure access to emergency obstetric care.

But the problem is particularly entrenched among young people.

“We are trying to train the (contraception) providers to be youth-friendly,” he told AFP.

And for those who survive childbirth, life choices are restricted.

The government has only recently allowed school-aged mothers to go back to class and many of those who do lack the support they need.

“Before the reopening of school the child was very small and on breast milk. There was no one to take care of her except me,” said Neima Foday, 19, speaking to AFP in the town of Kailahun with 13-month-old baby Ishmail on her knee.

“I'm a bit worried because my friends are attending school and I'm not,” she said, adding that without an education she knew money would always be a problem.

Asked if Ishmail's father was contributing to his son's upkeep, Foday shook her head.

“I haven't seen him since I told him I was pregnant,” she said.

AFP

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Queen and Cameron in double trouble

Posted: 11 May 2016 02:04 AM PDT

British PM David Cameron called Nigeria and Afghanistan “possibly the two most corrupt countries” as Queen Elizabeth II was caught making her own gaffe.

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London - British Prime Minister David Cameron called Nigeria and Afghanistan “possibly the two most corrupt countries in the world” in inadvertently public remarks on Tuesday, as Queen Elizabeth II was caught making her own gaffe about a “rude” Chinese delegation.

Cameron was filmed making the remarks to the Queen and Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby at an event at Buckingham Palace, ahead of an anti-corruption summit he is hosting in London on Thursday.

“We've got some leaders of some fantastically corrupt countries coming to Britain,” the prime minister said.

“Nigeria and Afghanistan, possibly the two most corrupt countries in the world,” he added.

Welby, who worked as an oil executive in West Africa before joining the church and who has also undertaken conflict resolution work in Nigeria, noted that “this particular president is actually not corrupt”.

“He's really trying,” Cameron agreed, and the Queen noted to Welby: “He is trying, isn't he?”

It was not clear to whom they were referring, but Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari and Afghanistan's President Ashraf Ghani are both due to attend the summit.

At a separate garden party event on Tuesday, the Queen was caught on camera describing the delegation for a Chinese state visit last year as “rude”.

Police commander Lucy D'Orsi was introduced to the Queen as the woman who oversaw security for the visit of President Xi Jinping and his wife in October, to which the monarch replied: “Oh, bad luck”.

D'Orsi was recorded as saying, “I'm not sure whether you knew, but it was quite a testing time for me,” to which the Queen replied that she did know, before adding that members of the Chinese delegation “were very rude to the ambassador”.

The police commander agreed, saying, “It was very rude and very undiplomatic I thought”. It was not clear which members of the delegation they were referring to.

Beijing and Chinese state media at the time hailed the visit as a high watermark in Sino-British relations.

There was no immediate response from Chinese officials to Tuesday's remarks, while the Daily Mail cited Buckingham Palace as saying it would not comment on the queen's private conversations.

“However the Chinese State Visit was extremely successful and all parties worked closely to ensure it proceeded smoothly,” the British newspaper quoted a spokesman as saying.

A spokesman for the Nigerian president said Cameron's comments on corruption were “embarrassing”.

“This is embarrassing to us, to say the least, given the good work that the President is doing. The eyes of the world are on what is happening here,” spokesman Garba Shehu said in remarks released on social media.

“The prime minister must be looking at an old snapshot of Nigeria. Things are changing with corruption and everything else.”

Buhari has embarked on a widespread anti-corruption campaign since taking office one year ago, and is due to give a speech on the issue in London on Wednesday.

In Afghanistan, Ghani also made a promise to rein in runaway corruption when he was elected in 2014.

On Tuesday, a Downing Street spokeswoman said it would not comment on a private conversation, but noted that both Buhari and Ghani “have acknowledged the scale of the corruption challenge they face in their countries”.

She said that in a collection of essays to be published at the summit, Ghani writes that Afghanistan is “one of the most corrupt countries on Earth”.

Buhari, for his part, writes that corruption became a “way of life” under “supposedly accountable democratic governments”, the spokeswoman said.

She concluded: “Both leaders have been invited to the summit because they are driving the fight against corruption in their countries.”

AFP

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Children dying in Giwa barracks - Amnesty

Posted: 11 May 2016 01:57 AM PDT

Babies and children are reportedly among the more than 100 people to have died in detention this year in a military barracks in Nigeria.

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Dakar - Babies and children are among more than 100 people to have died in detention this year in a military barracks in northeast Nigeria where suspected Boko Haram members are being held, often without any evidence, Amnesty International said on Wednesday.

Around 1 200 people, one in 10 of whom are children, are being detained at Giwa barracks in the city of Maiduguri, where they are kept in dirty, overcrowded cells without enough food or water and denied access to legal aid or a trial, Amnesty said.

Some 150 people, including seven young children and four babies, have died this year in Giwa barracks, many from disease, hunger, dehydration, and gunshots wounds, according to Amnesty.

Nigerian government officials were not immediately available for comment.

Former detainees told Amnesty that inmates received half a litre of water each day, lacked access to washing facilities, and slept on the floor in cells that were rarely cleaned.

“People are detained, often with their children, in appalling conditions which do not meet basic human rights, or keep them alive,” Amnesty's Nigeria researcher Daniel Eyre said.

A regional offensive last year drove Boko Haram from much of the territory it held in northern Nigeria, undermining its seven-year campaign to carve out an Islamist caliphate.

Young men suspected of fighting for the militants are being rounded up in mass arrests - often without any evidence against them - by the military as they return to their homes in towns and villages previously held by Boko Haram, Amnesty said.

The number of children and women being detained in Giwa has increased ten-fold - 250 this year up from 25 last year - amid a spike in the use of female suicide bombers by the militant group to carry out attacks and raids, according to the rights group.

“Once detained, there is scant investigation, no opportunity to contest the legality of their detention and no access to legal aid ... people are relying on the military to determine their innocence,” Eyre told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

Some 7 000 detainees have died in military detention in Nigeria since 2011 as a result of starvation, thirst, disease, torture and a lack of medical attention, Amnesty said last year.

The rights group urged Nigeria's President Muhammadu Buhari to uphold his promise to investigate the deaths, release the children in detention and shut down Giwa barracks immediately.

The United Nations children's agency (UNICEF) said it was concerned by the situation in Giwa, adding that UN conventions state that children should only be detained as a last resort.

Reuters

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