FOR several hours penultimate Friday, a mild drama played out at the premises of the prestigious Eko Hospital in Lagos. The family of one late Mustapha Tajudeen, who had died five days earlier, on Monday, January 19, stormed the premises of the hospital along Mobolaji Bank Anthony way, Ikeja, Lagos, to demand the release of his corpse allegedly detained by the hospital.
At stake was the sum of N1.066 million, being the alleged balance of the medical charges incurred by the late Tajudeen as an in-patient at the hospital. While the management of the hospital maintained that the debt must be settled before the corpse would be released, the family insisted that having lost its son despite having deposited the sum of N1.7 million, the hospital should write off the balance of N1.06 million.
For days, both parties maintained their stance. The matter was made worse by the fact that the late Tajudeen was a Muslim, whose religious tenet maintains that a dead person should be buried within 24 hours.
But it came to a head on Friday, January 23, when alongside members of the Committee for the Defence of Human Rights (CDHR), family members of late Tajudeen stormed the office of Eko Hospital with placards bearing different inscriptions.
Among the inscriptions were: ‘Eko Hospital please release our corpse;’ ‘Eko Hospital, we need our corpse for burial’ and ‘Haba!’ After N1.7m another N1.06m’. They chanted protest songs as they moved about in the premises of the hospital, vowing not to vacate the premises until the remains of their dead relation was released to them.
For hours, vehicular and human movement along the busy Mobolaji Bank-Anthony was disrupted by the peaceful protest. Soon after the protest started, the hospital management quickly arranged a meeting with representatives of the family. But after a few tense minutes inside, the representatives emerged with glooming faces, and disclosed that no agreement was reached.
The information seemed to pour more fuel on a burning fire, as the crowd became angrier, threatening not to vacate the premises of the hospital until their demands were met.
The arrival of a team of policemen did little to calm the situation. “We are not going to leave this place until they release our corpse for us. The man was a Muslim and we ought to have buried him about five days ago. Let them bring a Black Maria to carry all of us away,” the protesters maintained. In fact, their countenance revealed they were prepared for the worst as they insisted that they were prepared to spend a whole week in the hospital premises if the corpse was not released to them.
They rebuffed the entreaties of the police to leave the premises for their representatives to go in and meet with the management of the hospital. They remained resolute to their cause and in defiance of the police request, they instructed their members to stay back in the hospital.
The ding-dong affair between the protesters and the police continued for a while without any attack against each other. However, credit should go to the police for their resolve to employ mediation instead of force to resolve the matter.
The family claimed that they resorted to the protest after the hospital asked them to pay the sum of N1.067 million before the corpse could be released to them. Before then, they said they had paid the sum of N1.7million in the course of the deceased’s treatment. They wondered how the additional bill was arrived at when the patient in question was already dead.
For the embattled family, the ‘detention’ of their son’s corpse was an additional trauma for both the relations and the corpse. Aside from the additional money allegedly demanded by the hospital, the family was particularly miffed by the fact that the deceased, a Muslim, was still kept in the morgue when he ought to have been buried within 24 hours according to Islamic rites.
The spokesman of the family, Mr. Hakeem Mustapha, emphatically told The Nation that they were at the hospital to collect their brother’s remains and nothing short of that would make them leave the premises. “We are here to collect the remains of our brother. We have paid the sum of N1.7 million and now that we wanted to take his corpse, they said we must pay additional sum of N1.067 million before they would release it to us.
“Thereafter, I wrote them officially, pleading that we should be allowed to pay the sum of N500, 000 and take his corpse because we could not afford the sum they asked us to pay. I wrote the letter on the 19th of January and had it delivered the same day but as I am talking to you now, they have not responded. When we brought him here, they assured us that they were capable of reviving him but they couldn’t do just that and now they are asking us for such amount of money.
“The leadership of CDHR subsequently wrote them on our behalf, but also got no reply to that effect. The deceased was a Muslim and an Alhaji for that matter. His remains ought to have been interred within 24 hours of his death, according to Islamic injunctions, but here we are still struggling to get his body released by the management of the hospital,” he stated.
But a short drama was introduced into the protest when a passer-by, who after finding out the reason behind the crisis, burst into a popular song by late afrobeat legend, Fela Anikulapo-Kuti. The song, ‘double wahala for dedi bodi and the owners of dedi bodi’, drew wild laughter from everybody around.
But for Tajudeen’s widow, Alhaja Sakirat Mustapha, the issue on ground was not a laughing matter. The crest-fallen woman spoke with The Nation. Seated in a blue space bus and praying with her Islamic rosary, apparently to gain some succour, she recalled that the late hubby’s predicament started as a mere malaria.
“We got married in 1984 and we had lived all along without him falling seriously ill,” she began, adding: “The whole problem that led to his death started in June, last year, when he began to complain of severe tiredness. Thereafter, he started complaining of headache. We took him to a hospital in Ijebu-Ode, Ogun State, and he was admitted.
“After some time in the hospital, the doctor asked us to do some tests here in Lagos State. It was around this time that it was diagnosed that he was suffering from brain tumour-related sickness and not malaria as we had thought.
“After a while, we took him to another private hospital here. From there, he was referred to the Gbagada General Hospital. When the medical personnel proceeded on industrial action, we took him to the Lagos University Teaching Hospital (LUTH). He was there until they also commenced industrial action. It was then we were advised to take him to EKO Hospital by some people who assured us that they have the equipment and the expertise to salvage the situation.”
With tears streaming down her cheeks, Alhaja Sakirat Mustapha recounted her last encounter with the deceased, saying: “When I visited on that fateful day that he died, he could not talk because he had been in coma for a while. In spite of that, I still sat there in the hospital. Later on, a doctor came and asked me to leave. I left without any premonitions that that would be the last time I would see him alive.
“Shortly after I got home, I received the sad news of his death. It was shocking and unthinkable because he had always assured me all along that he would be fine. He had always told me that he would soon recover and would rejoin the family to fulfill all the plans he had for the family, the children in particular, because he made their education his priority.”
In their search for cure from the very moment the deceased was diagnosed of brain tumour to the point of his death, the family claimed it had spent no less than N6 million in the various hospitals they took him to, most times selling off properties to raise the money.
“Aside from his wife and children, brothers and sisters, our brother left behind his aged parents. We have spent all that we had as savings and gone ahead to sell his houses and lands, including the ones owned by his aged parents, to raise money for his treatment with the hope that he would pull through the sickness. The last property we sold was a land belonging to his aged mother.
“Our parents, out of their desire that he survived, gave out their landed properties for us to sell and raise money to foot the medical bill. Unfortunately, he did not survive it after all those efforts,” Akeem added with a faded voice.
Tajudeen’s children, all wearing pale faces, lamented the untimely exit of their father. They feared that his exit may have put paid to their dream of furthering their education to the university level. One of them, Islamia Mustapha, 13, and a senior secondary school student, said her dream of becoming a medical doctor is now hanging in the balance.
“It is quite painful and frustrating for us to be going through all that we are facing now. I have not been going to school since my father died because it will be psychologically traumatising to be in school when the corpse of my father that should have been buried is still lying there in the mortuary. I don’t know how my ambition will be realised now that he is no more because there is nobody anywhere that I can look up to help me realise my dream of becoming a medical doctor.”
The younger sister, Zainab, lamented that they were not allowed to see their father before he died, adding: “We made efforts to see our daddy before he died, but we were prevented from seeing him. They told us that we are too young to have access to him. The last born of the family did not see what he looked like because he was born when our father was first admitted.
“The family has spent everything and sold off everything that we could have fallen back on, all in the bid to keep him alive. But today, we have been finding it difficult to eat three square meals every day. When you look at all these, it would appear suicidal to think of paying the money the hospital demanded for. I was sent away from school last week because my school fee had not been paid. We would be writing test next week and if I don’t pay, I would not be allowed to write the test. Does that not cast shadows over my education and future?”
The eldest daughter, Munirat, said her hope of writing her senior secondary school examination appeared to have been dashed with the death of the family’s breadwinner. “All I can see around my education is darkness. There is no hope again. We are still bemoaning this when the hospital asked us to come with a whooping sum of N1.067 million before we could take his corpse away for burial.
“My sisters and I have completed our Quranic studies that he was eagerly looking forward to. He promised to provide us with all the necessary things that we needed for our graduation, but that is not possible again,” she said.
But the management of the hospital, while explaining its stance in the matter, told The Nation that the family was ignorant of the workings of a private hospital. Maintaining that it empathises with the bereaved family over the loss of their breadwinner, the hospital said it wants the family and the public to understand that as a private liability company, it was difficult for it to write off a bill of over N1 million, which it claimed would not cover the expenses it expended on the patient.
The hospital’s Chief Operating Officer (COO), Dr Owoyele Ademolu, said: “The key value of our hospital is to empathise with our patients. This is why we don’t turn down any patients at our door steps. When he was brought here, he came with a diagnosis of a brain tumour, with overwhelming sepsis. We accepted him and because he was not stable for surgery as that time, he was taken into the Intensive Care Unit (ICU). With that, we accepted the liability to treat him no matter what. For that, they paid a deposit of N1. 6million.”
Dr. Ademolu said the hospital invited specialists to carry out the operation, adding that all the specialists were paid by the hospital after each of them completed their jobs.
Insisting that the hospital was pained by the loss of its patient, he said the family should understand the plight of the hospital in the matter, saying: “We feel for them. And as a responsible hospital, we are willing to give the family a significant reduction. We want them to reason with us. But they are saying they want the corpse without paying anything. That is not fair.”
But soon after that promise, and further meetings between the management of the hospital and representatives of the family, both parties found a common ground when it was agreed that the family should pay the sum of N200, 000, as against the sum of N1.06million it was supposed to pay.
As the news of the agreement filtered out, the restive family members waiting outside for news rose in wild jubilation and burst into songs, praising the hospital for the decision. In a telephone chat with The Nation, a member of the family, who identified himself simply as Baba Jia, while thanking the hospital for its understanding, said the corpse was interred at about 6pm last Friday, January 23.
