N850M CATARACT SURGERY FUND MISSING

THE whereabouts of N850 million appropriated by the Federal Ministry of Health for free cataract surgery across the country is now a subject of controversy among ministry officials, the office of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and the Ophthalmological Society of Nigeria (OSN).

An authoritative source told the Nigerian Compass that the money has disappeared mysteriously.

The idea for a cataract reduction programme was formulated by the OSN which promoted it vigorously before the MDGs office agreed to fund the free surgery programme.

Tagged: “Special Programme for the Elimination of Cataracts or SPECS”, a Ministry source insisted that the idea became imperative because while one out of every 200 Nigerians is blind from cataracts, the country has one of the lowest Cataract Surgical Rates (CSR), “mainly because poor people cannot afford to pay for the procedure.”

The source added: “OSN was concerned that only about 300 cataract surgeries per million population per year is carried out in Nigeria, compared with over 3000 in India.  This means there are so many hundreds of thousands of Nigerians requiring cataract surgery and not getting it. This is the so-called “cataract backlog”.

Based on the advocacy efforts of the Society, the MDG under Hajiya Amina Az-Zubair (the former Senior Special Assistant, SSA, to the President on MDGs) approved the cataract reduction project, but opted to utilise the Federal Ministry of Health as the executing agency.

This was opposed to the initial plan to make the funds available either directly to the society or to the National Eye Centre (NEC) in Kaduna.

The MDG, under the new SSA, Dr. Precious Kalamba Gbeneol, carried forward the plan to implement this project.

The fund, according to investigations, was released early last year and lodged in one of the accounts of the ministry while officials tried to determine how best to utilise it. As at the last check, however, the fund could no longer be accounted for.

An angry ministry official told this newspaper that keeping the money idle for one year was a mistake, as “it has now been completely misappropriated while not a single cataract surgery has been undertaken as at today”.

An official of OSN who also lamented the development said “the programme had the potential of boosting the esteem of the Federal Government in the eyes of the long-suffering Nigerian populace. It would have been a major achievement of the Jonathan administration, particularly as it relates to the much-vaunted transformation agenda of the President.

An Associate Professor of ophthalmology and the immediate Past President of the OSN, Dr. Femi Babalola who spoke with our correspondent on the issue, confirmed that indeed some funds were released by MDG department for cataract surgery.

According to him, shortly after the money was given to the Ministry during the first quarter of 2012, officials of the Ministry invited OSN representatives to offer advice on how best to utilise the funds.

“A meeting was held with Ministry officials last December, attended by the current president of the OSN, Dr. Kunle Hassan; the Director of the National Eye Centre in Kaduna, Dr. Godwin Adejor; the Coordinator of the National Blindness Prevention Programme, Dr. Uwaez Onyebuchi; Dr. Babalola the IPP of the OSN, and others.

“A plan was submitted to the Ministry for implementation and I heard the Minister of Health, Professor Onyebuchi has approved that the cataract programme be rolled out. Unfortunately, the funds are now nowhere to be found.”

Babalola advised that efforts should be made to recover the funds and that in future, the funds should be domiciled at the National Eye Center (NEC) in Kaduna and jointly administered by the OSN and the NEC.

Source: Compass