HOME FRONT

Six-year-old Chilotaram Mba looked skinny and sickly. Her height is a sharp contrast to her age as anyone could easily mistake her for a child half her age.

Her four-year-old sister, Princess Mba, is also in the same condition.

Their aunt, Agatha Mba, who translates on behalf of their mother (because she does not speak English), narrates their stories saying that the doctors had diagnosed her two nieces as being malnourished and in need of treatment.

But the contrast is that these kids are from Enugu State, where the communities boast of surplus of greens and vegetables, foods, tubers and fruits.

In Nigeria as a whole - from the east, west, north and south - most parts of the regions are endowed with different types of food, fruits and vegetables, yet the scourge of malnutrition is still recorded.

A quick survey of some Nigerian markets by the Homefront showed that foodstuffs are overflowing them, as there is abundance of all kinds of food items such as millet, sorghum, coconuts, sweet potatoes, tomatoes, dried chilies and fruits like, mangoes, oranges, pawpaw and avocado pear across most regions.

But despite this blessing, which shows surplus of food, children still suffer malnutrition, with the country losing about 2,300 under five year children and 145 women yearly.

The United Nations Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF) revealed that the underlying factor of child and maternal morbidity in Nigeria is malnutrition, adding that although many of these deaths were preventable, coverage and quality of treatment are lacking.

Malnutrition is a condition that occurs when people consistently do not consume or absorb the right amounts and types of food and essential nutrients. Globally, it contributes to nearly half of all child deaths resulting in more than three million children each year.

Mrs. Herriatha Ugwu, the State Nutrition Officer, Enugu State Ministry of Health, explained that the main indicator of childhood malnutrition is stunting; when children are too short for their ages leading to poor physical growth and brain development and preventing them from thriving and living up to their full potentials.

She added that the case of stunting is irreversible, because it has already disrupted the child’s brain and it’s development.

She said right from the conception of the child in the mother’s womb, the countdown of the 1,000 days of the child begins, the kind of food the mother eats and passes to the child is of paramount importance.

“When the child is born, the most important factor is for the mother to start breast feeding the child immediately, putting the child to the breast, and to continue to breast feed the child exclusively for six months. This saves the child from a lot of childhood diseases and especially malnutrition, and its free and cheap.

“But unfortunately most mothers don’t do this; they start giving some kinds of liquids, endangering the lives of their babies.

“Another sad truth is that most women do not go for antenatal when they are pregnant, so all these teachings on what to eat, or feed the child, the mothers do not get the information,” she said.

Ugwu revealed that though some of the women engage in some petty trading or small scale farming around their homes, they rather sell the products to get money than use the food to feed their family.

Speaking on extreme cases of stunting when the damage has already set in, Mrs Ugwu added that the only treatment they can give, is to teach the caregivers different ways of preparing locally available food for their children.

“But there is the RUTF from UNICEF which when given to any malnourished child, within the space of 10 days the child will bounce back to life. Our former malnutrition specialist calls it a miracle food because immediately you start giving them RUTF they jack back to life,” she said.

Agatha recalled when she got to the village and saw that her brother’s children were looking sickly and she had to intervene by taking them to the health centre where it was discovered that the two girls were malnourished and did not have enough blood.

“The doctor wrote some drugs for me to buy and I did but they couldn’t continue with the drugs because of lack of money. Their father is just a palm wine tapper while their mother does petty trading. I also learnt that the children were not well fed with the right food that their