Professor Moji Christiana Adeyeye came to the University of Lagos, Nigeria, from her U.S. base, in 2006, as a Fulbright Scholar. That year, she published a book, Out of The Mouths of Children…And What Everyone Should Know About HIV/AIDS. But Adeyeye’s interest and devotion to people living with AIDS stem from her training and vocation as a pharmacist whose interests span re-formulation, formulation and manufacturing of drugs. And for a whole year, she worked closely with donor agencies and international organisations in her campaign to bring care and hope to AIDS patients, particularly in the South-West region of Nigeria. Last year, Adeyeye got another Fulbright scholarship but chose Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile- Ife, as her preferred choice of institution. Unlike the experience at the University of Lagos, OAU opened her eyes to the rot and mismanagement afflicting public institutions in Nigeria. The scholar was also shocked at the level of infrastructural decay and corporate fraud among the Nigerian political elite, particularly with regard to the on-going effort to re-brand Nigeria. Adeyeye, who is the founder of Drugs For HIV/AIDS Patients, teaches at Duquesne University’s Mylan School of Pharmacy. She was named the 2008 Fellow in Pharmaceutical Technology by the American Association of Pharmaceutical Scientists, AAPS. She spoke with SYLVESTER ASOYA and IDOWU OGUNLEYE on her experiences in Nigeria.
Q: This is your second time around as a Fulbright Scholar, how would you describe your experience in Nigeria?
A: The motivation for choosing Nigeria in the first place is because this is my native country. Secondly, I believe that I can contribute to pharmaceutical education in Nigeria. So the first time, it was great but equally frustrating, yet it was highly rewarding and productive. It was productive academically speaking because we had collaborative research with my colleagues at the University of Lagos and we presented papers and articles at international conferences. This second time around, I will not say that I am better prepared because I was prepared mentally, the first time, in case of disappointments that I could run into basically due to lack of infrastructure. But now, Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile Ife is not located in a very big city, so it is easier to move around, but in terms of the students, my experiences were great because you could see the students who were eager to learn and they were so involved. But what broke my heart this time around was the fact that it was not just the information that I gave them or my perception on whether they are receiving it or not, but it is what I believe is the oppressed psyche that our student have here. An example of what I am talking about was what I observed recently. I was giving my lectures, about four or five times the light kept going back and forth and each time the light went off, the students would hiss corporately and whenever the light came back, they would hiss again. And I wanted to weep, I am talking about physically weeping for this country because these are students that are very respectful, so it wasn’t as if they disregarded me. But they just couldn’t control themselves. So, I told them that I was very sympathetic, that I understand and identify with what they just expressed. But it broke my heart because they are young people that are supposed to be receiving information and building up their knowledge base. What I have just seen was unacceptable. In other countries where infrastructure work, maybe students like them would hiss once in six months, one year or may never get to hiss. But they said to me, ‘Prof. we hiss every time’ and I just couldn’t get over it. No child prayed to come to one particular country or one particular family. Each child was born due to the willingness of two adults, man and woman. Why then should the case of the Nigerian child be completely different from children from other parts of the world? And we have recently been talking about branding Nigeria. I don’t want to hear about any branding or re-branding until there is electricity for two years. I don’t want to hear about re-branding until we have pipe-borne water which we had in the 1960s. In my village, we had water since 1957. When we have infrastructure in place, then we can talk about branding. Afterall, what is branding? Branding is presenting and packaging for others in order to change their perception. However, if the average undergraduate uses candle to study, and the average person in the street is experiencing the same thing, and there is electronic fraud because three generations have not seen Nigeria work and if 419 is celebrated at big parties and even in churches then we should not be talking about re-branding. Look at our roads, nobody is safe on the road because you might run into a pothole or a gang of armed robbers. Please let us stop talking about re-branding. We can only talk about re-branding when we have taken care of these evils. Afterall, this re-branding is targeted at the outside world. If we had electricity, security, water, then our re-branding would make sense. We must take care of our children and our young people. In fact, we must apologise to our children that we lost it. This is because people of my age are in power right now. We lost it and we must say that we are sorry, just like the South Africans did after apartheid.
Q: Every serious country that wants to develop takes university education very seriously. You have been visiting Nigerian universities for about five years now, what are your findings? Do you think our universities are still centres of learning?
A: They are supposed to be centres of learning but they are not functioning the way they should. That is the very sad part of my experience over these past five years. Regularly, I talk about dreams and I discuss with my colleagues on this. I told them that you cannot dream of doing any kind of research when you don’t have facilities. I can sit down in my lab in the US and dream that I am going to design this and that because I know that the facilities are there or that I can access them. There is an equipment known as Differential Scanning Calorimetre, DSC. We use it a lot in our pre-formulation or pre-development characterisation of drugs and other components that go into a formulation because it can tell you whether there will be interaction or not. There is not a single Calorimetre in Nigeria. And I did not know this until I went to Jos and was discussing with a younger colleague who told me that. So, where is the dream? The dream has been quashed in my colleagues here, some of whom are even brighter than me. I told them at Ife that I just had opportunity and that despite what God has blessed me with intellectually, there is nothing to boast about. Afterall, if I was still here, I may be worse than my colleagues. At the University of Lagos, there was no single Analytical Equipment, HPLC and these are routine examples. These are equipment that are used for routine analysis and my colleagues were asking me what I could do for them, I told them that we can do some collaboration, we can sign Memorandum of Understanding with my University. Our universities are in bad shape. These universities are not centres of learning in so many professions. It may be in professions where you don’t need laboratory equipment but in my own profession, it is a different case.
Q: Last year, a drug, My Pikin, killed so many Nigerian children. As a pharmacist, what was your immediate reaction to the news of this killer drug?
A: My emotions ran high. Part of what I teach in the US is good manufacturing practices and one of the things we emphasise now is quality by design. This means that before you start the development of a drug, you have to plan, from where you get your raw materials and the countries these raw materials come from. I made a presentation in Atlanta last September and I spoke on the ingredients that go into a formulation. And I cited Nigeria in terms of the disasters that had happened in the past, children dying because of people substituting a particular diet for another. The same thing happened in Haiti because the person that allegedly started this company in China, just for gain wanted to use a cheaper product which is poisonous. So, when I heard about My Pikin, I became very emotional. You see, when it comes to children, I tend to be very emotional because they are helpless. If they take something unwholesome, they cannot say immediately that their stomach is turning and they cannot induce vomiting easily. But adults could easily go to hospital on their own and complain. To know that 80 children died needlessly is unbearable for me as a professional. I told some of my students during the course of my lectures that I cannot start a company in Nigeria unless it is approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, FDA, and that is why it is difficult for me to come to Nigeria where there are so many loopholes in the distribution system through which adulterated products can come in. Before Dora Akunyili, it was unimaginable. Now, it is a little bit reduced, but it is still there. So, the My Pikin incident touched my soul because children shouldn’t die needlessly.
Q: Talking about children, your book, Out Of The Mouths Of Children, was an intervention to save children suffering from HIV/AIDS. How would you describe the entire process?
A: It has been very rewarding. What led me into HIV/AIDS in the first place were children. If you look at the preface of the book, it was one young boy, Nkosi Johnson of South Africa who was dying, very articulate 12-year-old boy who was begging the world not to discriminate against children, that it was not their fault that they have HIV/AIDS. So that was how I started. And there were no drugs when I started in 2003, and millions were dying. So, I started producing drugs for HIV/AIDS patients. But children were not factored into the equation in terms of HIV/AIDS. And for each adult that had HIV, there was at least, a child in a family. So, I started by taking care of the adults first, because you cannot take care of a child when the father or mother is lying down. But in terms of book, we knew that we cannot take care of the adults without spreading the news in terms of awareness and prevention to children. This was how the book came. In terms of progress, the focus has been sharpened, first because of funding, secondly because I am doing what I really wanted to do, which is to take care of children. About three years ago, we started distributing food for orphans and then we had funding to undertake prevention of the spread of the virus from mother to child. We got money from US for screening, rapid testing on the population and then identifying positive pregnant women. A major part of the funding also went into buying equipment. Another significant portion of the funding went into paying doctors to do caesarean section because that reduces the chance of the mother infecting the child.
Q: You are married to an activist and a radical politician, how much trouble has he been giving you?
A: To tell you the truth, he has been giving me sleepless nights, sleepless nights on my knees. Sleepless nights in increasing my faith in God. Actually, when I was at Nsukka, I got involved in politics but with my husband in politics and activism, I feel one is too ‘‘many’’ for a family. That was why I stepped back, meaning that I enjoy what he is doing and I support him. We cry together over Nigeria, we cried together during the pro-democracy years, and during the Radio Kudirat era. So, there is no trouble at all.
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