There was controversy on Saturday over an alleged huge deaths of about 110 persons in Azare town, headquarters of Katagum Local Government Area of Bauchi State, within the past two weeks.
The drama began when a former member of the House of Representatives, Ibrahim Mohammed Baba, raised the alarm in a letter to the President, Major General Muhammadu Buhari (retd.), informing him of the death of over 100 persons in the town in the last one week.
The letter was obtained by Sunday PUNCH on Saturday.
Baba, who confirmed to one of our correspondents that he wrote the letter, claimed that the deaths were due to the outbreak of coronavirus in the town. The outbreak, he said, resulted in over 100 fatalities, “throwing the entire area into great mourning, panic and confusion.”
The former lawmaker served between 2015 and 2019, reelected in 2019 but removed by the Elections Petitions Tribunal. He also said about 286 persons were allegedly buried at the Azare cemetery in the last two weeks, adding that anyone in doubt should visit the cemetery to verify his claim.
He said, “If you go to the graveyard, they have a register there and you would see it yourself. In the last two weeks, they registered more than 286 bodies at the Azare graveyard. The normal death rate in the town was about one to two per day, so you have to raise the alarm when you are burying 200 to 300 persons in two weeks and over 100 per week. Our people are dying, do we have to keep quiet?
“We are not blaming anybody; this is a pandemic, we are just asking the government to take further action. The Federal Medical Centre there is doing well; they have over 20 people in isolation there. It’s a case of community transmission like the one in Kano.
“Go to the Federal Medical Centre isolation centre and ask them how many people they have there within two weeks. When Justice Dahiru Saleh died, the record was around 236. If you go to the Azare cemetery, the register is there. What we are trying to do is to inform the government to do the needful. We are asking for a testing centre and other measures the government can deploy to give palliatives to people.”
In the letter titled, ‘Massive COVID-19 outbreak in Azare: Request for urgent action’, Baba, who once represented Katagum Federal Constituency, requested the President to intervene urgently.
The letter partly read, “The centrality and proximity of Azare to Bauchi, Kano and some major cities of Jigawa State makes the town’s large population susceptible to the virus due to the already existing large cases of the disease in those areas.
“And because media coverage is always largely skewed towards states capitals and other more prominent cities, the ongoing horrific situation in Azare has not got the attention it deserves, and that is why I want to use this privilege to appeal to you for urgent action to arrest the unpalatable situation.
“Consequently therefore, I wish to appeal to Your Excellency to direct the Nigeria Centre for Disease Control and the Presidential Task Force on COVID-19 to urgently reach out to Azare town with all the necessary facilities and palliatives to assist the communities there.
“And to help in this expected effort, may I draw your attention to the fact that an Opthalmology unit and laboratory have already been built and equipped by the Central Bank of Nigeria at the Azare Federal Medical Centre since 2013 but have not been inaugurated and put to use till now.”
Meanwhile, the total number of cases in the state rose to 161 following the addition of the 44 new cases detected on Saturday.
Overall, there were 239 new cases in the country on Saturday, pushing the total cases to 4,151. Number of deaths increased to 128 while 745 persons have so far been discharged.
PUNCH