Zeal Akaraiwai does not have the wings of an angel – he has a sleek
black Mercedes, all purring engine and deep leather seats. This
40-something financial consultant – trim and neat – steps out of his car
in a potholed government hospital car park in Lagos. He is greeted
warmly by a team of social workers, and gets straight to business. He
asks them for “the list”.
Neatly printed on A4 paper are the
names of patients who are well enough to go home. But they are not going
anywhere, because they cannot pay their medical bills.
Zeal has
met people who have been forced to stay on the ward for six – or even
eight – weeks after they have been discharged. Some Nigerian hospitals
set up instalment plans, but even the first instalment might be too
onerous for those earning a pittance, or nothing at all.
The
social workers guide Zeal to the bedside of a patient with a heavily
bandaged thigh. He bends down close, and speaks in a low voice: “What
happened to you?” The young man, a barber, says he was shot by
he-doesn’t-know-who.
Zeal does not keep in touch with any of the
people he helps. He does not even want to be thanked. But there is one
thing he would like in return – that one day they might tell a story
about him: the story of how when they were in hospital, an angel came,
paid their bill and left.
“That’s why I call this the Angel Project,” he says. “Be the angel you hope to meet.”
Paying
the fees of hospital patients who are not able to settle their bills is
one of the ways that Zeal realises his Christian faith. He says he
wants to show people that everyone can do something to help someone
else. Zeal’s friends and family also give him money for the project, and
he keeps receipts in a neat black book, together with details of the
patients whose bills he’s paid.
In the women’s ward, Zeal is
taken to see a patient in her 60s who is unconscious and on oxygen. She
has had a serious stroke. The social workers want Zeal to pay the bill
she has run up so far, so she can be moved to an intensive care unit for
specialist treatment. He shakes his head, and moves away from her
bedside.
Paying for this woman’s treatment would mean breaking
Zeal’s own, self-imposed, rules – he does not generally help anyone with
a serious, on-going condition. The Angel Project pays for those who are
well enough to go home immediately.
“Of course, sometimes I digress,” he says.
He
remembers Montserrat – a woman who bled for 11 months because she
needed a hysterectomy. Zeal paid $400 for her operation. And on today’s
visit to this public hospital, there is a good deal more digression.
The
Angel Project picks up the tab for a patient who needs a leg ulcer
operation, and Zeal wants to know about the progress of a 10-year-old
who is awaiting further intestinal surgery. He has paid for her
treatment so far, and will continue to do so until she returns home. The
social worker says the child is doing very well.
Zeal has met this little girl, but he does not want to see her again. “She has my son’s eyes,” he remembers.
Today,
Zeal visits everyone on the social workers’ list. He heads out to the
cashier to settle the bills of eight patients. His hospital philanthropy
always makes him feel sad, and he is angered by the failure of
government.
“The mere fact an individual, like me, has to go
into a hospital to pay the bills of people who are stranded speaks
volumes about the injustice in the system,” he says. “There’s no reason
why we cannot have proper health insurance. We have clever people who
can think of schemes that can work.”
In Nigeria only 5% of the
population is covered by health insurance. There is scepticism about how
a universal scheme might operate, given the huge disparities of wealth,
and the millions of poor people whose contributions would have to be
covered by the state. But Zeal is impatient.
“Every week I see
the impact of not having compulsory health insurance, and people die. So
where do you want to put the price of a human life?”
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