By Kuni Tyessi in Abuja
The Ooni of Ife, Adeyeye Eniitan Ogunwusi, has joined the Senate, opinion leaders and major institutions working on improving care for women and girls in the country to appeal to all tiers of governments in the country to invest more resources in the uptake of family planning programmes and other health interventions targeted at saving lives of women and girls.
Addressing the 5th Annual Family Planning Consultative Stakeholders meeting in Abuja , the Ooni challenged government to lead campaigns on quality life for women and girls by ensuring huge deaths recorded among female folks in the country daily are reduced.
He frowned at the manner at which women die of preventable conditions across the country and called for measures towards halting the deaths. The monarch likened such deaths with daily crash of airplane carrying 120 passengers, which he said should put affected nations into continuous mourning.
At the three-day meeting where new multi-media communication plan and logo for family planning/child spacing was developed by the federal government to help change behavioural pattern of Nigerians to family planning services were launched, the Ooni said it was high time all tiers of government in the country made needed and sustainable investments to improve the health of women and girls.
“This initiative is something that I am very passionate about; child spacing, family planning. We only talk about it; we are just scratching the surface. It is something that is deeper than that. I repeat it is something that we should take very seriously in our country. Just imagine this practical illustration. We don’t pray for disaster.
“You can imagine if we have a plane crash and we have 120 future leaders inside that plane crash. That is a national disaster. The entire country will be thrown into a state of mourning. That will be the discussion for at least one week. Various offices, everywhere; that is what people will be talking about.
“There is no difference between what we are here today (talking about) and that same national disaster that I just compared. The only difference is material loss of aircraft. But, we have loss of human beings. You can imagine losing 110 women on a daily basis in this country. You can imagine having statistics of maybe those children coming to this world innocently will make it. You can imagine that national disaster on a daily basis.
“The reason we are not feeling it is that one will happen in Sokoto, another one will happen in Kafanchan, one will happen in Osun, one will happen in Lagos . It is being spread across the country. It is not being put together the way that national disaster I’ve just compared will be. It is very important for us to take this thing very seriously,†he said.
