Adoption saga: My story – Obioma Imoke

•Allegation won’t dampen my passion for children –CRS First Lady

In Calabar, Cross River State, a matter that was hitherto dismissed as an idle beer-parlour talk has suddenly assumed a larger-than-life proportion. It is such that Mrs. Obioma Imoke, wife of the state’s governor, has become alarmed, as she, in her words, is seeing outright falsehood become elevated to the revered pedestal of truth. And she’s not alone.

Our correspondent, Judex Okoro, reports that Mothers Against Child Abandonment (MACA), a Non-Governmental Organisation (NGO) established by the First Lady has given the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) 14 days to retract a story aired yesterday or be sued for defamation.

In the report, the BBC claimed that the NGO compels pregnant and vulnerable teenagers to give out their children for adoption once they put to bed.

But a statement issued in Calabar described the report with the title, ‘Nigerian’s battle to keep her baby’, as an unconscionable hatchet job commissioned to destroy all the good works being done by the NGO.

“This vicious attack is absurd. As in almost all such instances, it is not clear why these vendors of pain choose to target an NGO that has served humanity creditably well in the past years.”

The statement accused the BBC reporter, Will Ross, of willfully consorting with purveyors of falsehood to distort facts all in a bid to destroy the NGO.

“Mr. Ross in his report gave the impression that there was no prior communication or contact between him and Dr. Elihu Osim, who he interviewed as a way of giving credibility to his report. He would want his listeners to believe that his interview with Osim was randomly done after most staff of the University of Calabar Teaching Hospital reportedly refused to be interviewed.

“But the truth is that Dr. Osim has had communication with Ross before the interview. Indeed, Ross did the report based on a petition written by Osim.”

Meanwhile, Mrs. Imoke says the allegations against her NGO will not dampen her passion to make “Cross River State fit for not only a child, but for all rural women” even though she says it is demoralizing.

“This twisting of what you are doing to make it look as if you are doing something bad is quite demoralising. That to me has been one of the greatest challenges that we have had.”

 In an interview with select journalists in Calabar, she said: “You know that is life. We have all sorts of people and I just put it down to the devil’s advocate.

“You ask yourself, where were they when the children were being abandoned on the road? What had they done to the mothers and fathers of those children who would not have them back? You know, I don’t understand it.

“I had a very sad day one day. I actually called my husband and told him, you know what: I am going to leave this. I don’t want people writing and talking about me. There is this doctor in the University of Calabar Teaching Hospital (Osim), who had literally written to everybody he could possibly write to, saying I was trafficking children. It just doesn’t make sense. I can’t understand the wickedness behind that. I called my husband and said I am shutting down everything. He came back from work early that day to come and counsel me.

“How can one think about such a thing? It is evil. If you are such a great activist yet the children are being abandoned all over, what have you done to save their lives? We cannot be perfect but we are trying to do what we know is right. We have young girls who come with absolutely nothing. We start from the beginning, we buy them clothes, we clean them up, and we send them to the hospitals to do their medicals. We beg them, it is on their forms, and our first choice is that you take your child with you. And we don’t take anybody twice because we believe that when you pass through our programme you should be able to respect your body and all that.

“So you ask yourself how people come up with these things. We have no exchange policy. We know why we are doing it. It is to save that child’s life. We never exchange money, gifts or anything for those children. But I have gone past that. Too bad for the detractors! I am going to do what God has asked me to do and I will do it well.

 Why the focus on women and children?

When I came to Cross River State with my husband, I promised to complement his efforts. The passion comes from buying into what my husband is doing and the desire to see things better for the people.

If you know my husband very well, he is very passionate about the downtrodden; passionate about majority of the people who are actually not in the urban areas. He calls them people that need government the most. So he has inculcated that in my psyche and so my main focus has been to look at the best way to also get at those who should really experience government.

And in a bid to do that that, we decided to do a baseline data of what was happening in Cross River State, what do the women do and the men and so on. In the process we realized that it is very important to empower a woman because doing that means not touching the woman alone, but touching her family- her husbands and children. So we went for a holistic approach to developing the woman. We have a slogan that says “put more money in the hands of a woman.”

 Could you just throw light on some of these programmes you have initiated so far?

We initiated a programme called Partnership Opportunities for Women Empowerment Realization (POWER). It is a holistic way of empowering women. I believe in partnerships. What I set out to do was not to teach women new things but to help them to take what they are doing to another level basically. 72 per cent of the women in Cross River State are farmers; we needed to start our interventions through farming. But in the process of this holistic approach, we have had to look into other incidences and issues that had come up from this programme.

For instance, when we started talking to women about farming and what to do, we realized that they were taking their children to farms. And for us in Cross River State, government has initiated a free and compulsory education programme, so I did not understand why they were not taking advantage of it. So, we had to go out there and advocate for these children to be put in schools.

Firstly, we initiated a programme called A-State-Fit-for-A-Child (ASFAC). This again is a holistic approach to ensuring that the child even from the womb through school years to adolescence get a total package as the government is able to give to them. In the process of looking at Cross River State being a society for a child, we realized that a lot of children were being abandoned on the streets. When I say children, I mean babies, infants.

My first experience was when one of my staff called me and said they just found a baby in the trash can. I was a bit confused. I had never experienced that before. And I said bring the baby to my house. She called me back and said the baby was dead. I made investigations and found out that it was something that was common. Again, I found out that some of the girls that got pregnant hide it from their parents for fear of being kicked out of their homes. So, once they have those babies, they throw them away so that nobody knows. I don’t think that any child is a mistake.

I don’t believe that God made a mistake by bringing a child into the world. So I thought of how to stop people from killing children because if you don’t get to the children in time, they die. I decided to reach out to young girls, teenagers and young adults and talk to them about how to take pride in them and not engage in casual sex or what we call premarital sex. It was really difficult for me. So we said what do we do with them? Do we kick them out? The answer was no! So, we found a way of rehabilitating them.

So we started another programme called Mothers Against Child Abandonment (MACA). In this programme we have two homes which are the Refuge Baby and the Refuge Girls. At the Refuge Girls, we keep young girls who are pregnant and we teach them life skills to enable them live independently forever when they leave. One of the important things we tell them, as they come in and go through our counselling, is that we hope they would take their babies when they are leaving; and we are willing to help them if they need help to look after their babies.

I can tell you that the programme has been able to save quite a number of girls and I believe we have also been able to rehabilitate a good number of our children, young girls and some of them have gone back to school. In a bid to do this, we thought it would be good if they have someone like a role model. So, we initiated the Calabar Carnival Queen (CCQ). It is not beauty pageant per se.

It is pageant where we chose someone to be a role model for young ones in Cross River State, and after the pageant we chose our Carnival Queen. Her project is that throughout the whole year she goes to schools and talk to young girls about the ills of casual and premarital sex. We preach abstinence because we know it is the only way to avoid unwanted pregnancies, sexually transmitted diseases as well as one of the best ways of avoiding HIV/AIDS.

Furthermore, one day I was sitting in my house and my child was sick, and I kept looking at this child and she was getting worse. So I took her to the doctor and said I don’t know what is wrong with my daughter as her condition was deteriorating and he says bring her in now. There at the emergency room of the University of Calabar Teaching Hospital, he took a look at her and said she has pneumonia. I was surprised because I thought pneumonia was for people who had exposed themselves to cold for a very long time.

However, I used that opportunity to go round to see the other kids in the hospital and every one of them had pneumonia. They were at least 8 babies. I was there for two hours and in those two hours, two children died. The doctor then started telling me about pneumonia. What I found fascinating about it was one that it is preventable and two, it is curable and yet children were dying.

So by the time he gave me the statistics it was scary because he said 20 children die every hour from pneumonia. Now that is ridiculous for a disease that is preventable and treatable. So I decided that why don’t we take this too and again get the women to understand that your child does not have to have pneumonia, so we started a state-wide advocacy to enlighten women on what pneumonia is all about, how to identify and treat it and so on. We tagged that programme, Breath of Life, because we want the child to breath and live. And that again would make Cross River State fit for every woman and every child.

Then again I got a call from UNICEF saying we have street children in Calabar. I said no, that this is Calabar, clean and green; a tourism state. So they said we are going to send someone to you to take you to where these children are. They took me to the back of Okoi Arikpo House and I saw 36 children staying there. I interviewed some of them. Some said their parents had died; their aunties do not want them; they ran away from home for whatever reason.

Quite frankly it was not a very good sight. One of the things I did was that we were able to give them food on a daily basis. Because they needed food, people were using them to make money to get food. They were running drugs. They were doing all sorts of things just to be able to make money. So we established a resettlement home, Destiny Child Centre, for the reintegration and rehabilitation of street children.

We moved them into that home on the 16th of October 2009, and presently, there are over 100 children there. The good news is that they are all in school or there are all in vocational skills training. We have a few that have graduated from vocational skills training and we applied for jobs for them in technical companies and all that. We thank God their lives are better. We have also been able to re-unite some of them with their parents because that is the end result we are looking at, and get them to live happily ever after.

However, there are a group of women that I did not really hear much about. And these are the widows. During our last campaigns I did a lot of sensitization with the widows and found out from them what it is that the really needed. So, I decided to put something together for them especially in areas where they are being maltreated or where they are having rough times. We started an initiative which we call Giving Life Options to Widows (GLOW).

Basically, we want to not just focus on women but this set of women who are disadvantaged just by the mere fact that their husbands died, ostracized or stigmatized, and they are not able to access funds and facilities the way other women do. We want to make a conscious effort to get these things to them so that they can live without feeling that their lives ended when their husbands died.

Culled from Sun