Renaissance man of Africa

It is well! Last month saw a lot of firsts – first time I had eba (pounded cassava), first time I drank pure water from a plastic bag, first time I ate fresh cashew fruit straight from the tree, first time I had audience with a traditional ruler and first time I met the Leonardo da Vinci of Africa, dr. Oluyombo Awojobi of Eruwa, Oyo State, Nigeria.

CFC is co-producing a documentary on the extraordinary doctor, Dr. Awojobi, in the small rural townof Eruwa and I spent a few days on the shoot in May and got a fix of tranquility and renewed hope in humankind, so I felt I needed to share this story...

Being in Eruwa reminded me of the Africa I had pictured in my mind’s eyes before I set out on my Nigerian adventure: cool, quiet mornings with the cock crowing and the distant sound of voices and domestic activity. Rural Nigeria is oh so different from crazy-busy Lagos. The fences are low, no burglar proof on windows, people greet and smile without expecting a dash for directions. There are endless vistas of palm groves and lush ground vegetation, where you see flocks of white birds take off … and the farmers growing yam are colourful little patterned dots in the green expanse of farm fields. Life is hard but honest… far from the shifty business mindedness and never ending hustle of the city.

Dr. Awojobi came to Eruwa in the 80ies as a young surgeon in training. He was meant to stay for one month to provide surgical service to the community but he returned to Eruwa upon finishing his qualifications and after a few years in government service set up his clinic, ACE - designed by him from scratch and funded without any external support.

ACE is no ordinary hospital. There is no sign of computers or copy machines but records of the 107,000 patients, that have been seen here throughout the years, are neatly kept on paper registration cards in the archive all the same. There is no fancy ambulance with sirens, instead a tricycle with a roof, inspired by the tuk-tuks of India shuttle the patients efficiently.

All around the clinic examples of rudimentary yet life-saving solutions abound. The operation table utilises a car jack to lever up the patients and the distiller and autoclave in the back, made out of domestic cooking gas cylinders, are powered by corn cobs given to the clinic by farmers who use part of the clinic’s land to grow their produce. ACE gets access to bio-fuel and the farmers get rid of waste.

Another recycling solution is simple but perfect: rainwater during rainy season is collected in large reservoir tanks and is lead through the pipe system to showers and from there used for flushing the toilets. It is only during the dry season there is a need to use the six wells drilled on the premises. In fact, a nearby school is also using ACE’s distilled water for performing experiments in their chemistry lab and Awojobi’s locally made distiller won an award from the Natural Agency for Science and Engineering Infrastructure.

Speaking of labs, the centrifuge in Awojobi’s lab that separates the blood from other bodily fluids is another practical invention that does not rely on erratic Nigerian power supply from NEPA (colloquially called Never Expect Power Always). The machine was fabricated out of the back wheel of a bicycle and is manually operated when there is no light. The home-grown inverter is running on car batteries to charge the solar-power fridge in the lab. These are only some of the many ingenious solutions the clinic, or rather its champion, the doctor, has come up with. He is an inventor as much as he is a surgeon, a man with a true philanthropic outlook.

Dr. Awojobi is not interested in patenting the inventions he created, rather he would love to see other people follow in his footsteps and use such equipment to aid rural healthcare delivery. Having been invited to the UK for a 6-month training, he declined, saying that his patients can’t go without him for that long and only visited Britain for 2 weeks.

There was a deliberate decision behind not training abroad but rather in Nigeria during his residency training. Dr Awojobi’s decision was based on the “implicit confidence that all my teachers at Ibadan were world renowned and could train their kind in Nigeria”. He is a firm believer of Nigerians solving their problems themselves, rather than waiting for foreign expertise or help and he is certainly leading by example!