As early as 6 o’clock in the morning, Bello Umar, the Sarkin Kutare (chief of lepers) will come out of his thatched mud hut after the early morning prayers and walk about 50 meters outside his zinc-fenced compound to tend his livestock.
With his fingers now deformed by leprosy, which he suffered since an early age, Umar will fetch dried corn leaves and cobs from the granary and dropped them inside a half-metal drum container and watches as the animals rush for their breakfast. The livestock, comprising about 50 sheep and goats, will finish the feed within five minutes and dispersed to graze for the remaining hours of the day, while their owner leaves to prepare for farm, which is just a stone throw from the community.
The 54-year-old Sarkin Kutare has maintained this routine since the last 10 years when he and other leprosy victims at Kamfanin Kutare, a lepers colony behind the Specialist Hospital in the outskirt of Minna, the Niger state capital were handed some grants by a leprosy mission to begin a livestock business, a gesture that has improved their economic livelihood and kept them away from begging.
“We started by buying young animals and nurse them for two to three years before we start selling,” Umar said. “Today one person can boast of at least 10 to 15 goats and sheep… We no longer go to the market to sell our animals, people come to purchase them, especially during festive seasons.”
Within the limited land in the colony, the lepers cultivate maize, melon, and yam, which now depend heavily on fertilizer to yield, due to over-cultivation. In a good year, each farmer harvests 15 to 20 bags of maize and melon, in addition to about 50 tubers of yam. It is these items they feed on all year round and also trade for money to send their children to school.
However, their lives are now threatened by the activities of rustlers who frequently sneaked into the colony at night to steal the animals, and other items. Hence, the 500 herds hitherto in the community is gradually depleting, and sustenance of the inhabitant descends with frequent destruction of their farmlands by government officials.
Strange families
Located at the outskirts of the Niger State capital, the Minna Leprosy Referral Centre (MLRC) is one of the oldest of such facilities in northern Nigeria. The facility built during the British colonial administration, managed and operated by the missionary until 1975 when the North-western regional government took over after the exit of the missionaries. It was again taken over by the Niger State government after the creation of the state in 1976.
The facility which is the only referral centre for leprosy patients in the northern axis, has played host to over 20,000 patients suffering from the disease, and other related diseases, including tuberculosis.
The colony, located in an open field, was established about 70 years ago by the first leprosy patients that came from different parts of the defunct Northern region to seek cure for the disease in the hospital. They had decided to stay within the vicinity of the hospital for easy access to treatment and also to avoid stigmatization by society.
Today, the colony has about 50 households with over 300 population of the lepers and their offspring who are non-carriers of the Hansen’s disease, but still face stigmatization among their peers in the city like their parents and grandparents.
A bleak future
Children in the colony attend a primary school in one of the surrounding villages with inadequate teaching aids, no playing ground for the pupils, while the only toilet built by The Leprosy Mission (TLM) has collapsed with the pupils defecating in the open, while some of the pupils take lessons on bare floor.
Few of the pupils proceed beyond primary school which was built by TLM, and those that do later drop out due to lack of funds. For the female students, primary education is the highest they could get, after which they wait to reach puberty before they are married out to their cousins within the colony.
Threat from within
“We learnt that government share things during the COVID-19 pandemic, but nothing come to us,” Sarkin Kutare said. “We were lucky during the time that we have good yields from our farms from the previous year, that was what we fed on during the period,” he said.
He told 21st CENTURY CHRONICLE that they were not also aware of the households and agricultural grants disburse by the Central Bank of Nigeria to mitigate the COVID-19 pandemic
“Unlike during electioneering campaigns when people will come here to convince us to vote for them, when government intervention come we don’t hear anything from anybody, and we don’t benefit from them. People should consider our plight. We are also citizens of this state and this country. Our children also deserve better lives,” he said.
However, what is worrisome to the inhabitants of the community was the decision of the state government to evict them from their present location, to give room for expansion of the specialist hospital.
“Where do they want us to go,” asked Muhammed Sani, one of the grandchildren in the colony. “Though our grand parents came from different states, but this our home now.
“My father was born here, so we are from here, I don’t know why they are doing this to us,” Sani added as he wiped the tears coming from his eyes.
Those that will be affected more by the relocation or eviction are those still receiving treatment from the mission hospital that was purposely built to cater for the peculiarity of the disease.
“The condition of a patient can deteriorate at any time, and if he/she does not get medical attention immediately the deformity can so severe,” Sarkin Kutare said. “So we don’t know whether they will relocate us with our hospital, if not it will be a disaster.”
As tales of sorrow and abandonment continues in the colony, and all efforts to speak to the state Commissioner for Health, Dr. Makun Sidi, proved abortive, as he neither answered calls nor responded to text put through to his mobile phone, the fate of the lepers in a colony they founded over 70 years, continue to hang in the air.
