BY VICTORIA OJEME
ABUJA— National Primary Healthcare Development Agency,NPHCDA, said, Thursday, that its operations in North-East states are being hampered by the activities of the Boko Haram islamist sect.

The Acting Executive Secretary of the Agency, Dr Emmanuel Abanida, who said this in Abuja, lamented that some of its staff posted to the zone had to return, denying children and their mothers the opportunity of immunization due to the emerging security threat posed by Boko Haram.

The North-East states comprise Borno, Bauchi, Taraba, Adamawa, with Borno and Bauchi worst hit by the activities of the group.

The sect, in April bombed a vaccine storage facility in Maiduguri, Borno State, destroying immunization vaccines and storage facility

Speaking during the opening of a national planning meeting and workshop on impact evaluation of midwives service scheme, Abanida said, “There are two principal challenges in the North-East; security which, we thank God is getting abated, the other is operational. Some of our staff that have been posted to the North-East to do programmes have returned for fear of their lives.

“But we have got assurances from almost all the state governors in the North-East that the situation is getting back to normal and that we are all Nigerians. The Federal Government is doing a lot to ensure that security in the North-East is brought under control.

“There are some of these things that we, as an agency, do not have direct control over. On our part, we are appealing to the militants or whoever that is causing the security challenges in the North East to create windows of opportunity during public holidays so that we can reach the children and their mothers to whom we are rendering these services.”

He lamented that the distribution of health facilities in the North East were clustered and not well spread out, thus making it impossible to operate anywhere in the zone without fear of threat to their lives.

The NPHCDA CEO admitted that, “The distribution of health facilities in some local governments is more than others local governments. Even for the health facilities that are available, the human resources available in the North East seem to be a greater challenge in the North East more than any other geo-political region in Nigeria .

“So what we have done as an agency is to ensure that about 20 percent of our newly recruited staffs are been deployed to the North East geo-political zone. We are also doing internal redeployment of some of our staff to ensure that we have a critical mass of health workers that are going to work in the North East. So these are part of the special intervention we are giving to the North East.”

He also expressed concern over the increasing child and maternal mortality rates in Nigeria which, he said, was alarming.

According to him, “The figures vary as people tend to quote them; suffice to say that Nigeria has the worst child mortality rate in Africa and they will also have the worst maternal mortality rate in Africa .

“Approximately over 500 women will die in every 100,000 as a result of giving birth to children which is not supposed to be like that. Averagely too, close to 200 children out of 10,000 that are given birth to will die within the first five years which is high enough.

“The essence of this MSS is to take care of the mother, children in their first one month, in their first one year, until they reach the age of five. The essence of the impact evaluation is to ensure that what the MSS has been designed to achieve is achieved.

“At the end of the day we will be able to find out if there is reduction in the death of our women giving birth and if there is reduction in the number of children who die during birth. Are we really having reduction in the number of children being maimed as a result of factors which should be prevented?

“Are the health facilities doing more than what they are supposed to do? So it is like assessing for meaningful result. This impact evaluation is much more an indebt scientific review exercise that will involve the household and health facilities.”

Abanida also disclosed that although the agency is in all the states, “ownership and implementation differ from one state to the other and while we have successes stories in some places, there are challenges in others.