Apparently, ageing well may include being able to look back and laugh out loud about little things in the past, including being the first in one’s family lineage to ever see Lagos, Nigeria’s federal capital in the ’60s. Dr Mrs. Mary Ogebe, wife of former Supreme Court judge, Justice James Ogebe, became the first female medical doctor in Northern Nigeria before she realized it. Few decades earlier, she was just an unusual girl, who lost her dad at an early age and had a poor mother whose literacy was limited to reading the Hausa language version of the Holy Bible. Perched on hard wooden benches of articulated Bedford lorries almost filled with onions, groundnut and other food commodities being transported to cities, she would travel unaccompanied from her rural part of Benue State to distant lands in pursuit of education. Now in her 70s, and with three children who are all doing well in their respective professional callings abroad, she leads a very modest and quiet life, devoting much time to religious worship and charity work. She spoke during the week with Assistant Editor, JIDE BABALOLA at her Abuja home:
Please briefly tell us about your life, your family background, how you went to school and how life has been up to the point where you are now.
My parents were humble villagers, farmers and with very little education. I was born in 1944 and by the time I was 10 in 1954, my dad passed away and my widowed mother was saddled with the responsibility of educating me and my two younger brothers. It was hard for her but because she had promised to do what she could and with God helping me, I was doing well in school; she continued with my education. Right through primary school, I later had to even go away from home to another place to complete my primary school in those days before secondary school and I remember in those days, there were no buses or taxis. I travelled to Dass and beyond Bauchi; I was travelling through Tudun-Fulani, Jos, by lorries and trailers and those lorries would go once a week to the market down there to go and carry things like onions and groundnut, so I would sit on those benches. By that time, I was about 11 to 12 years old when I went to secondary school there; riding on lorries, sleeping in Bauchi because it was a two-day journey, but it was great because in those days, every adult was helpful to a young child unlike today when one would be afraid of being stolen or kidnapped and being raped. Those things I must say if they existed, they were very rare.
So after primary school, I passed exam to a place they called Gindiri Secondary School now in Plateau State and after that, I passed also to Queens College, Yaba, for Higher School Certificate and that was another huge one. I had never been to Lagos and I never thought I would go to Lagos but here was I, having to go to Lagos. My mom, a widow, only knew a few places where she went for church meetings.
You were the first person in your family lineage to go all the way southwards to Lagos?
Yes, yes! I was the first person in my family lineage to go to Lagos. In fact, there was a cousin who had gone to Lagos College of Education but I was the first one from my own immediate family and that was a huge thing. Again, there people always ready to help and assist. You would go and your mother, all she could do was write letters and receive your letters till you come back during holidays.
So, I did two years there and God helped me, I passed my papers and was admitted to the College of Medicine in University of Lagos to study Medicine. That took five years and it was when I was in College of Medicine that a senior, a man from Kano, told me that there were no female doctors in the whole North, but he knew of someone in his own state, Kano, who was studying medicine in Europe but that she was behind me and he was sure that I will be the first to qualify.
In which year did you qualify as a medical doctor?
I qualified in 1971 and that other lady qualified in 1972 from Europe. So that was when the idea came to my head that I was going to be the first in anything (Laughs). It wasn’t something I was pursuing, but he told me that and it proved to be true.
So, where did you start work and was your career path?
When I finished from Lagos, I came into Benue-Plateau State where the capital was Jos and there was a General Hospital in Jos. That was where I started my internship. I did the internship there and eventually I got a scholarship to do postgraduate studies, part of which I did in England and part at the University College Hospital, UCH Ibadan. By then, I was a family person. I was married with two kids, so I had to balance my family with my study at the same time.
In terms of sacrificing career for family and the way young ladies take it these days, what advice can you offer?
Many times, there is conflict between family and professional career, especially professions where training is continuous; you have to maintain yourself at the level and the pace at which technology is advancing but then the family cannot wait for you. Thankfully, God gives us the ability to conceive and have children. So to balance up the family both in terms of children coming in and your husband’s progress in his own field, he too had to progress. So, it can be difficult but one thing for sure that really helped me is the focus that both my husband and I had. We knew that our family responsibility was great, we knew that we were answerable to God and the society in the way we treated our growing family; so we looked for principles to follow. One principle we wanted follow was that we would give our children the best that we can give, both in terms of training academically and in social terms so that they would fit into the society, maximize the use of their own God-given gifts and intellect. Also, parents have to make sure that their spiritual lives do not get confused or relegated to the background.
So we wanted to nurture that strong Christian belief and carry it along with our professions. So, as the wife and the woman in the family, I realized that a man’s priority must take precedence over my own even if there is any debate about it, I had to be the one to give in. Thankfully, I didn’t have to give in before specialization as I was able to specialize in the field of Anesthesia and Anesthesiology and I practised and also went into administration in the medical field in the health services in Benue State and in the Ministry of Health. I was able to reach the pinnacle of those places before I had to take early retirement in order that the family can stay together in the coming years.
Did you opt for early retirement because your husband who later became a Justice of the Supreme Court was being transferred across various states?
Yes! I retired because my husband was being moved from the state service to federal service and he was going to be transferred. In the state service, there is virtually one station and you can move from one station to another within the same state but at the federal level, it turned out that he went all over the place. He was in Edo, Rivers, Lagos, Kaduna and eventually we ended up in Enugu and then, Abuja. That was quite over so many years and I have no regret at all for what we did because we were able to take the children along and educate them together.
How many children do you have?
We have three living children, two of them read Law and one studied Medicine. So, all the three are professionals in their own fields.
What would you say about the general health situation in Nigeria today, especially in comparison with the 1970s, and where we are now, especially vis-a-vis the situation in other parts of the world?
The health situation in Nigeria has improved a great deal. Let me take it from the 70s when I became aware that I could practise medicine. Then, there were lots of limitations. We have grown and come a long way in that area. There are so many doctors, even though we haven’t got enough to cover the population according to WHO requirement. We are not yet there but at least, there are many more families now that can boast of having a nurse or a doctor or a paramedic of some sort like community health practitioners, pharmacists and so on who can give advice. We have come a long way but we could have gone far better than that. We could have by now had our own specialist outfits that we won’t need to send people abroad for medical treatment so often. We should even have been getting citizens of neighboring countries to be flooding our nation not just shopping but even coming here on medical care tourism. We should have been sponsoring medical tourism in this country but we are not, instead, we are still going out. I think there is a gap which we need to cry about and as a medical person, I am not happy at all. I wish that we were not as bereft as we are now.
So many Nigerian doctors keep going to USA and other developing countries and in spite of the dearth of medical personnel, those that are around d are embarking on industrial strikes on a fairly regular basis…
The system generally in the country does not favour many professions, including Medicine. The system is such that you find that architects are starving, engineers are starving, veterinary doctors are starving, medical doctors, dental surgeons and others too. The system does not help matters. Let us say you have a private (medical) outfit, be it Pediatrics or Obstetrics and Gynaecology or General Medicine, you want to upgrade it, you import equipment and you employ your staff and so on. By the time you think you are now set to start breaking even, suddenly something happens and maybe, the value of the Naira crashes, people demand for better pay, you need to raise the price of your registration, surgery fees and so on in order to break even – it can be horrible! Imagine that the Naira has suddenly doubled in terms of what is required to buy the dollar and the things you buy are from outside the country and mostly bought in dollars, then you have to talk of staff emoluments, fuel price too goes up.
So, there is no stability for you to do things and so one can’t really blame those who can go outside, improve themselves and be marketable over there because here, it is like fighting a losing battle. But we thank God that not everybody goes out; there are people who are around and they are doing their best and that is life. Somehow, nature has a way of balancing up and I am afraid to say that some of my children’s course mates, between 70 to 90 percent of them, have left the country and they are doing well elsewhere. Some of them are even in private practice in their own units in a foreign land.
So, we keep hoping that things would improve and somehow, we would become stable in this country because we are endowed with a very stable climate, very predictable seasons of the year and then to top it all, we have solid minerals, oil and other resources which some neighbouring countries do not have and we have able-bodied people. The only in-born disease that we have seems to be sickle cell anemia but some countries have other several other diseases that have crippled their people so much and they have to be sorry for themselves that they don’t have a healthy population. But we have a very healthy population and we are able to eat from the soil; once the season comes, we have fresh food and we can store some, so we have nothing to complain about as such and we can’t really blame God for anything. We can only blame ourselves for not being efficient enough.
You and your husband are very passionate Christians, dedicated to the work of God but one wonders why you are not so keen about having an NGO umbrella under which to undertake your charitable activities.
We are both Christians and we are committed in following what the Bible says we should be doing. Although we don’t have an NGO of our own but we team up with a number of NGOs and help out with orphans particularly. The groups that we help out include orphans from areas that have been decimated by Boko Haram and herdsmen activities on the Plateau and in the North East. There are people who have brought in widows and orphans from those areas, we are caring for them. Even from Southern Kaduna where some villages were sacked about three to four years ago, many orphans were got from there. Their parents were killed and their grandparents are too old to support them and they were gathered into orphanages; so we team up with those NGOs and help them with welfare needs and other things. We believe that God has not really sent us to set up an NGO of our own; if he did, we probably would have gone into a specific one but no.
You feel concerned about the issue of the girl-child education; have you considered writing a book that can inspire or encourage coming generations of women?
I managed to do my primary education and go through to higher education but it really pains me that some girls’ education was cut down. At this time of my life, some girls are still finding it difficult; instead of them to be pampered and encouraged to prove themselves, girls are being abducted and turned into sex slaves and taken away from their families and forbidden from having western education. It really pains me that, that should happen and because of that, my biography, or rather, notes that I was jotting, I decided to give them to a historian who has written it out and we are hoping that by Easter period this year, I will present it to the public so that others would read and be encouraged to educate their girls and to help those who are orphans because at a stage, I was an orphan too. My dad died when I was 10 years old and my mom had to bear the burden of it all for some years. Now, there are many women in our country whose husbands are gone either through natural means or terrorist means in places where so many women are now widows. Nowadays, they even take some women away as slaves but anyway, their children should be educated and be helped in life so that they can be useful to themselves. So, I am looking forward to putting this book out so that it can fall into the hands of those who would be encouraged or inspired by it.
Is it not government that should take up such welfarist responsibility?
No, it is a duty for everybody. The book would inspire those who can share with orphans and women in disadvantaged situations; you don’t even have to be a rich person. Individuals should be able to help their neighbours. Some people don’t even pay attention to what is happening to people around them at all, even when such people eat from their dustbins, but we should all be able to help others out. So, if I had a wish, my wish is that people should learn to help widows and orphans in their localities because we never can tell who would become what in future.
The post Our experience caring for orphans, widows from boko haram, herdsmen killings-74-yr-old first female medical doctor from North Mary Ogede appeared first on The Nation Nigeria.