By Abdulgafar Oladimeji
Former Emir of Kano and erstwhile governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria, CBN, Muhammad Sanusi II has lamented that the future development of Nigeria is under severe threat from high number of cases of malnutrition and infant maternal mortality recorded in the county.
Muhammad Sanusi speaking at his installation as Grand Advocate of Nutrition of Nigeria organized by Nigeria Nutrition Society(NSN) held at hotel seventeen in Kaduna on Wednesday said the future of Nigeria is blink, if the issues of anemia and malnourished children are not hurriedly addressed by policy and health stakeholders in Nigeria .
He warned that Nigeria in the next 20 years would not be position to fit to compete in what he described as the fourth industrial revolution.
In his words “ NSN is the only society I have accepted to serve on its board of trustees, it is the first and the last and the reason because nutrition is one of the issues that should be of development concern in our country and which I believe very strongly is not been given the right attention.
“The second of course which I believe and feel passionately about is education of the girl child, I told the governors that anytime we delay attention to nutrition, we are destroying generations.
“The figures that we have on malnutrition in Nigeria are horrendous, when we break it down to regions and break it down to states you can only wonder, if decision makers are aware of the severity of the problems they face.
“We went to the National Economic Council some of the governors were extremely honest to say they have never been confronted with these figures.
“In a state in Northern Nigeria, you have more that 60 percent of under 5 years old children suffering from malnutrition , it just sounds like numbers, but that entire generation of under 5 years old children in the next 20 years will be the ones that are expected to come out of university, they are the ones you expect to be your doctors, engineers and your computer scientist,” Muhammad Sanusi stated.
He warned that “We are in a world of fourth industrial revolution, where you must have strong cognitive strength and capacity and malnutrition has destroyed their capacity from childhood, now 20 years from now those who are suppose to be in front of research and entrepreneurship are simply incapable of producing the kind of work that we need for Nigeria to be competitive where will Nigeria be 20 years from now.
“In the next 20 years, it is the Kenyans that will be running the IT companies, Kenyans will be internationally competitive in robotics and artificial intelligence and our people will be security guards, cook, drivers and labourers. We cannot continue ignoring this problem, it is not about not having a budget like many would always say, it is simply teaching people what they need to know.
“I always give example of a man in a village who grows beans, he sells the beans in town and he is eating bread and coke and he thinks he has arrived, he denies himself, he denies his children of the basic nutrition that they need.
“It is not a matter of budget and cost, how much does it cost to produce groundnuts.
“We have 200 million people in Nigeria, we don’t have one factory that produces food, so i think for me your society needs to continue to raise its profile, raise its voice, the one thing I can guarantee you, the one thing I can promise you is, I will never loose my voice until maybe I am six feet down, not when I am still walking ion the surface of earth.
“We will continue to advocate for nutrition, we will continue to advocate for the education of the girl child, the two are related because as you educate the girl child, when she becomes a young mother, she would understand nutrition, she would understand how to handle herself during pregnancy, and how to handle her newly born child.
“Every time I have the opportunity, I will continue to advocate on nutrition, now i am not writing on nutrition, I am writing on banking ,but I will find time to actually begin to actually write on nutrition and its relationship to development.
The former CBN governor further said “Because when we speak on nutrition we are speaking on behalf of millions of young people who cannot speak for themselves, we are speaking for people who are marginalize ,uneducated and jobless, the same people where in their families we have high mortality rate, high infant maternal mortality rate, which is not a health problem, it is a nutrition problem, half of the children who die, died out of malnutrition, a child has cholera he dies, but he dies because his body is malnourished and could not cope with it. A woman dies in childbirth because she is malnourished, she died because she has iron deficiency, until we begin to address anemia we will not see these number go down.
“I know the vice president has always expressed his concern, the school feeding programme is there, but before these children get enrolled into school they are already six, seven years old ,we need to address the problem before their enrollment into schools, meaning we got to deal with it in the first 1000 days in the life span of these children.
“We got to deal with it, we got to work on policies, we got to work on data and education, we got to deal with it,” Sanusi insisted.
