Farmer |
Not less than 10
million Nigerian children or 13 per cent of the population of children
in the country are at the risk of becoming mentally deformed in
adulthood - no thanks to nutrient deprivation, particularly lack of
iodine in the diet.
According to data
from Countrymeters.info, as at the beginning of 2017, 40.9 per cent of
the population was aged below 15 while the 15- 65 years bracket
constituted 55.9 per cent and persons aged 65 and above accounted for
3.1 per cent.
In absolute figures, 77,599,973 of young Nigerians are under 15 years old (39,663,430 males and 37,938,439 females).
An average of 13 per cent of this figure which is approximately 10,087,996, is at risk.
Alarm
Raising the alarm
in Lagos, Emeritus professor of nutrition and former President of the
Nutrition Society of Nigeria, Professor Babatunde Oguntona, urged the
Federal government to pay more attention to nutrition of children in the
country and to scale up funding of malnutrition interventions.
Speaking in Lagos
at a Nutrition Symposium on "Malnutrition, Child Development and the
Media" organised by the Media Centre Against Child Malnutrition (MeCAM),
Oguntona, fondly referred to as Father of Nutrition in Nigeria, said it
could only be imagined the implication of having 13 per cent of
mentally deformed children becoming parliamentarians.
"Inadequate iodine
in our food is a serious threat. You can't talk of development when you
ignore the issue of nutrition status of your people."
Oguntona warned
that between 13 and 18 Nigerian children die of malnutrition and related
diseases every hour and called on the media to step up advocacy on the
issue.
School feeding
programme: He identified the school feeding programme as one of the ways
to make up for children that are marginally malnourished, "First we
have a lot of children in this country who have escaped childhood period
and carried over a lot of nutrient deficiency into their early school
years.
"But they are able to continue and the longer they live, the more nutritional deficiency takes effect.
"So a country that
is wise will catch them at the school level and try as much as possible
to make up for that deficiency through adequate school meal."
According to the
nutriton scientist, the benefits of school meals is to provide critical
nutrients that might be missing or missed in early years for the
affected children and also help them to stay in school and benefit from
schooling.
"It is only when
you do that that you can produce children who will develop the country.
If you don't do that you are going to lose a lot of children to
malnutrition and they will continue to carry it over till adulthood.
Such adults cannot truly sustainably develop in a country.
"Another thing is
brain power; a hungry child cannot concentrate. We may not be able to
quantify the benefit of school meals in naira and kobo but the country
would have benefited a lot and some of the children that would have
succumbed to diseases would have been made immuned."
Improper funding:
Nigeria currently lacks proper funding to address the problem, noted
Sunday Okoronkwo, a project manager at the Civil Society on Scaling Up
Nutrition Nigeria (CS-SUNN), who said the actual number of stunted
children in the country could most likely be higher than 11 million.
Okoronkwo, who
represented the CS-SUNN project director, Mrs Beatrice Eluaka, lamented
that the country's $912m action plan on nutrition for 2014 through 2019
remains largely unfunded.
He noted that Nigeria's $100 million counterpart funding of the policy is hardly captured in the annual federal budgets.
He said the 2017 federal budget has no provision for the plan which expires in 2019.
The National
Coordinator of MeCAM in Nigeria, Mr. Remmy Nweke observed that tackling
malnutrition early enough in life is the best proactive measure to have a
future of people with sound health and feeding habits and that
prospecting a nation with sound economy after all, a healthy nation is a
wealthy nation.
"As you may be
aware, the number of Nigerian malnourished children is a big chunk in
the world which accounted for over 2.5 million who are suffering from
Severe Acute Malnutrition (SAM) as at the end of July 2017, according to
UNICEF.
This is exclusive
of others who may be suffering from various forms of malnutrition,
quoted at between 11,000,000 and 13,000,000.
Noting that
Nigeria's rates of severe wasting are among the world's highest at
around 1.9 million children each year, Nweke said 1 in 10 of all
severely wasted children worldwide live in Nigeria.
"Its time we engage
the populace and policy makers towards seeking improved attention for
malnutrition and especially in children.
Top pro-nutrition
civil society groups, including Community Health and Research Initiative
(CHRI), Scaling Up Nutrition Business Network Nigeria and Global
Alliance on Improved Nutrition (GAIN), attended the event.
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