By Umaru Fofana
On a local bench she sat. Just outside the Ebola treatment ward in Kenema. She looked pensive - apparently lost in some puzzlement. I later learned that she had just knocked off for the day and was waiting for a friend so they would go home. Since she was not in uniform, I had thought her to be a relative of someone admitted inside the makeshift structure just behind her, which served as ward for Ebola patients.
Jessica, not her real name, was in fact a nurse. She sat the way she did because, as she would later tell me, one of their colleagues was behind the tarpaulin wall that was marked "HIGH RISK AREA". Not administering treatment to an Ebola patient, but rather infected with the virus herself, apparently by someone she had been caring for inside the same ward. The sick colleague would later die.
Jessica - a mother - was naturally concerned about her admitted colleague. But she was worried that she could become a victim like her, like many others before her. She was also extremely concerned about her family. "Who will take care of her family if she dies?" she asked rhetorically of her colleague. The colleague died a week later. That was in late June. Sadly, Jessica fell victim to Ebola in August. And she too passed away.
Now you understand why Jessica was pensive. Perhaps she was hopeless. As she stared at apparently nothing, she could see sickness and death. Horror! Terror! As unleashed by Ebola. Over two dozen health workers at the Kenema Ebola clinic have succumbed to the disease - among them doctors, lab technicians, ambulance drivers and porters. And that figure does not include those health care givers who have died elsewhere in the country from the same disease as they unsuspectingly tended to patients.
On a day like this - when Sierra Leone's leading Ebola doctor, the late Dr Shek Umar Khan would have been celebrating his 40th birthday, one cannot write about the welfare of our health workers who keep dying in the face of Ebola without a mention of the man who also made the ultimate sacrifice in the fight. Exactly six weeks ago today - 29 July - Dr Khan died as he continued to care for viral haemorrhagic fever patients in Kenema, eastern Sierra Leone. He succumbed to a virus from whose claws he had saved over a hundred of his compatriots. So have dozens of nurses and other health care workers.
No one needs telling that the more our health workers die the more worrisome the situation becomes for their colleagues and their families, and the more apocalyptic the situation gets for the rest of us.
With such high mortality rates among them, health care workers are naturally bound to be concerned - even worried - about their own safety - and the future of their loved ones or families. Yes, because if they get infected the risk is high for their families; but also what becomes of the family where they are the breadwinners. This explains why protecting them in live and caring for their families - in death - is so key it cannot be overemphasised.
In Sierra Leone health care givers have nothing to give them back a live - figurative speak - when they die in service. No health insurance, no risk allowance. Life for their families, when they die, is in doubt if not hopeless. This is why an initiative by the National Revenue Authority to look after the welfare of families of health workers who die in Ebola service, is laudable.
Launched some two weeks ago, the scheme aims to provide for the schooling and other needs of these families. It is called "being proactive". We do not spend all our time on the 11 of September thinking about the 11 of September alone. The 12 of September is definitely coming and we should plan ahead of it. So an Ebola victims' families' fund for health care givers is a brilliant idea that should go beyond its current scope. Today - marking Dr Khan's birthday - would have been a symbolically nice day to launch such a scheme. Also, there are many ways to have gone about setting up such a fund. The Le 300 million plus that was raised by the revenue authority towards this was almost entirely voluntary donations by staff of the Authority. Good and altruistic as that may sound, it is NOT sustainable. Jessica's children, like those of the dozens of other health workers who have died and may die, do not need school fees this year with next year's not assured. They do not need to be scavenging around for health care which their parents gave up their lives giving.
Such a victims' fund must not be like the war victims' one after the RUF rebel war which became so lost in red tape that the victims became doubly so. This is a fund that should not be meant to be distributed one-off. This is a fund that should be sustained and sustainable for at least a generation as some of the health workers may have left - or may leave - children as young as one year old. It cannot therefore be at the goodwill of some philanthropist staff members at the revenue authority.
At first hearing that NRA has set up an Ebola victims' fund for families of fallen health care workers a curious mind goes straight to taxation. Yes, that's the way to go! How about a government initiative to set aside - for example - 1.5% of all taxes to take care of the families of all health workers who fall responding to our current Ebola scourge. That can be sustained for as long as taxes are paid - in other words FOREVER.
And I do not think NRA should administer such fund especially so if voluntary donations by businesspeople are to be encouraged. The Authority which must not parley with any businesspeople for they may be compromised and taxes evaded, could shoot itself in the foot. What if a businessman donated a huge amount towards the fund and a year, or so, later he defaulted on his obligations. It is a sore point for compromise.
And the NRA must not see itself as some private entreprise that should operate a Social Corporate Responsibility portfolio. My understanding is, and I think that makes a lot of sense, the Authority should ONLY raise revenue through the collection of taxes. How each and every leone is spent should not be their business - hence a CSR portfolio should be discouraged.
That said, their Ebola victims' fund for health workers should be taken over by the state with a presidential proclamation and all the legal frameworks fulfilled. And please, I do not mean a Commission to be set up, again, for this. The government is already unnecessarily bloated. Let a desk at the social welfare ministry work in sync with a desk at the health ministry to start realising this. It will not only motivate our health workers to get more involved in the biggest fight in our country's history - arguably bigger than even the RUF rebel war - it will also show fairness. We must not let our health workers down, the same way we let down our fighters - soldiers and civil defence force members alike - who died helping end our war.
(C) Politico, 11/09/14
