WIFE WEEPS AS N200M STALLS SUNTAI’S TREATMENT

The Chief Medical Director of the Taraba state Specialist Hospital, Jalingo, Professor Zakari Aliyu, has said that an initial refusal of Acting Governor Garba Umar to approve and release the sum of N200 million needed for the treatment of ailing Governor Danbaba Danfulani Suntai abroad made the latter’s wife Hauwa to weep.

Suntai had suffered serious injuries when a helicopter he was piloting crashed in a village near Yola, Adamawa state, last October.

Aliyu told an ad-hoc committee, constituted by the state House of Assembly over an interview he granted theDaily Trust on the health condition of Suntai recently, that he had sent a memo to the acting governor, who promised to get in touch with Suntai’s wife, adding that he later confirmed, a few days before he disclosed the health condition of Suntai, that nothing had changed two months after.

Based on the CMD’s testimony before the House of Assembly, it was believed in political circles in the state that the acting governor had initially baulked at the release of the needed funds for the transfer of Suntai from Germany to a better hospital in the United States.

Aliyu said that it was out of desperation to save Suntai that he granted the interview, adding that when he visited the ailing governor in December 2012, the condition in which he saw him was not encouraging.

According to him, “On my return from Germany, where I visited Governor Suntai, I wrote a memo to the acting governor, with suggestions that were not implemented. The first memo lasted for about a month unattended to and the reminder also lasted for another one month before I decided to go to the media.”

In response to a question on whether the media option paid off, Aliyu said after his newspaper interview, Suntai was finally moved to the U.S., a move he had recommended three months earlier.

Under cross-examination by counsel to the committee, Mr. Hosea Ibi, the doctor said what he released to the media was just a fraction of the horrible condition he saw Suntai in, which gave him a cause for concern.

He said as a physician, he had attended to Suntai as well as supervised the governor’s personal physicians in his capacity as his consultant physician.

He said: “I have been treating Governor Suntai of three chronic ailments for the past five years, and when he collapsed some time in 2009, I was the person called upon to revive him, and when he crashed, I was part of the medical team that evacuated him.”

Source: Blueprint