Kingsley Ugochukwu was asleep sometime in March 2023 when his phone rang. It was 2 a.m.
, and the female voice on the other end of the call asked him to come to the University of Abuja Teaching Hospital in Gwagwalada, where his pregnant wife was admitted. The doctors needed his consent for a major medical procedure. However, Mr Ugochukwu could not make the 44-kilometre journey to the hospital because he had no means of transporting himself there that night.
Also, security challenges in the Federal Capital Territory (FCT) make such a journey risky, even if he had a private vehicle. “That very day, I thought, ‘anything can happen’. Even the doctor called me to come; I told him I could not because it is very far,” Mr Ugochukwu told PREMIUM TIMES in an interview at his shop where he sells phone accessories in Kapuwa, Lugbe, a satellite town along the Umar Yar’Adua Expressway, also called Airport Road, in Abuja.
Mrs Ugochukwu would not have needed to be taken to Gwagwalada if a secondary healthcare facility was close to where the family lives in Lugbe. She started bleeding late in her second trimester. At the nearest primary healthcare facility, the bleeding did not stop.
She was advised to seek care at a general hospital 29.1 kilometres away in Kuje Area Council. “At the AMAC hospital, they could not stop the blood flow,” her husband recalled.
“They even asked me to sign a paper to remove the baby under six months — a 50/50 chance, they said, but my mind did not .
