We Branched Out Into Prostate Cancer To Save Nigerian Men-LEAH Foundation Founder, Omolewa Ahmed
LEAH Foundation, a non-governmental organization, is the brainchild of Mrs. Omolewa Yetunde Ahmed.
The Foundation has for years now worked towards having a society where the word ‘cancer’ loses its power by emphasizing that a diagnosis isn’t a death sentence, drawing attention to the fact that it is important to prevent cancer before it starts and putting stress on the need to ‘catch’ it early in order that people can live longer and healthier lives.
In this interview with Team@orientactualmags.com, the former Kwara State First Lady disclosed reasons why, the Foundation has taken a decision to branch out into ‘Prostate Cancer’ while promising to give this the needed energy and attention like the Foundation had done with regard to breast cancer and cervical cancer.
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February 4 is the World Cancer Day and LEAH Foundation has for years now been active in respect of advocacy and efforts to create awareness about cancer, how to prevent it, detect early and ensure that it doesn’t stand as a disease that will claim life.
What is LEAH Foundation planning to do ahead of this year’s World Cancer Day?
Thank you very much, like you said, the LEAH Foundation had since the year 2012 started this advocacy work and we have been focused on women for all these years concentrating a lot on breast cancer and cervical cancer, which is the highest killing cancer among the women and we’ve done quite a lot of work, I am sure you’ve followed our activities over the years , we’ve done massive advocacy to bring the awareness to the people and we are not there yet but I can tell you that going by the responses we have gotten especially last year , people are more aware, people are more disposed to discussing it, I mean women are now free to discuss it without fear of stigmatization, and as you are aware we also have a diagnostic center here in Ilorin and a hospital, but for a couple of years now we’ve noticed a trend and sometimes when I go for live programmes on radio when the men call in, after thanking me, they will say jocularly that ‘haha! madam, it is only women and women you have focused attention on, why?’ , and I want to thank God for how far He has helped us, so, for this year we are going all out, because I realized that there’s not so much advocacy, a lot of men are not even aware that prostate cancer is dangerous and from our experience through the diagnostic center and the hospital, most people do present late I am talking about prostate cancer and this is because the level of awareness is almost zero.
So, LEAH Foundation would by the grace of God go all out against prostate cancer in men for this year’s World Cancer Day ,so, we are going to official launch the advocacy and sensitization programme at the Kwara State Stadium, Ilorin, we want to have a massive rally that day you know just to create awareness and hopefully you will get to see our billboards, you know just like we went all out for breast cancer and cervical cancer we want to do the same for prostate cancer in men and some of the strategies we plan to use ,even before the rally which we started yesterday, I want to visit organizations like we did then I mean organizations where we have a higher concentration of men, you know there is hardly any vocation or business these days that you will not find women but Iam talking about organizations that are predominantly men like the NURTW, RTEAN,I was there yesterday and you know all those bodies we will visit them , we will visit the Brigade Commander at the Sobi Barracks, visit the airforce commandant, the police commissioner, where we have concentration of men , we want to create that awareness and it is about making everyone realize that it is important for men to present themselves for screening ,that is ahead of February 4.
Also, one of the strategies we used in respect of the breast cancer and cervical cancer was to get our traditional rulers involved and we will be doing this with prostate cancer too.
We will be visiting our father, His Royal Highness, the Emir of Ilorin and the other traditional rulers like we did in the past, you know I may not be able to go to all the 16 local governments like we did when we began that of the women, but we will plan to launch it at the three senatorial districts, that of Ilorin is coming up on the 4th of February at the Kwara State Stadium, and we are planning that of the Kwara South to take place in Offa on the 11th of February and on Thursday,11th is Tuesday I think Thursday is 13th, we are planning to go to Kwara North to launch the advocacy also in Sharagi, so, from there we will now begin to go to other local governments but those are the 3 major plans we have for the month of February, we are already working on our jingles, we will be having radio interviews , it is something we did before and we thank God that we were able to create the needed awareness, we are using the same template, we are going all out against prostate cancer in men.
Your Excellency, you are adding prostate cancer to your areas of focus how will you handle the segments and give them the needed attention? Will it not affect the breast cancer and cervical cancer segments?
Definitely not, no, no ,I mean when you talk of screening for breast cancer and cervical cancer in Kwara State and its environs, we’ve really established a strong presence for our foundation and I remember when we even started the advocacy work we had screening centers across the 16 local governments and we still do screenings, we do free screening for breast cancer and cervical cancer for women, every Thursdays at the LEAH Medical Center, and this is done all –year round and we have been doing this consistently and it is going to continue, we haven’t even gotten there, as much as we say we’ve gone far ,you will realize that we still need to do more, last year I heard of some deaths that really shook me, that with this amount of information out there, this still happened? so, it is not like we will abandon it ,we are only adding prostate cancer to it to take care of our men, that’s just what we are doing but we are still very active with respect to screening for breast cancer and cervical cancer because screening is the most important thing in the whole process, there’s a advocacy and you know that in our advocacy we want to make screening our focus , one of the things that we’ve been able to achieve with breast cancer and cervical cancer is to talk about importance of early detection, like October which is the breast cancer month we do free screening throughout the whole month, all those things will be done, it is an ongoing thing, we are not leaving one for the other we just want to also look after our men while still working on breast cancer and cervical cancer, we produced a local series on TV then and called it ‘sayewo’ ,but we focused on breast cancer and cervical cancer, so, I am bringing this back, I am already working on the script but focusing a lot on all the important things ,because we want people to be conscious of what we are talking about, I believe that when an information, I mean a critical information is passed through a story and the picture tends to stick to people, you know we also produced a movie called ‘Diamonds In The Sky’ that was on Netflix but we had a contract of 2 years with Netflix, it is now on LEAH Foundation’s YouTube page, it is still on that same advocacy and we are planning to also do something similar for prostate cancer.
What really are the advantages of early detection and why is it that important?
Early detection is very important, you know the 3 cancers we are working on at LEAH Foundation they may not be preventable but they are treatable and there are things that we can use also to reduce the risk factors, so, these are part of the things we want people to be aware of, you know people need to be conscious of taking care of their health ,what they eat, what exercise does for us, and how it helps us , but the thing is once it is discovered early, it can be tackled.
I have friends, I have people who had breast cancer and they had to do a vasectomy and 15, 20 years they are still alive, why? Because it was discovered early, so, that is the key thing and we also believe that being diagnosed with cancer is not a death sentence, so, that’s one of the things that we have talked about over the years , we have been giving people hope, that is why our movie is titled ‘Diamonds In The Sky’ meaning that no matter the cloudiness there is always light at the end of it, so, if you discover early that is the critical thing and it saves lives , but when you leave it and the unfortunate thing with cancer is that the more it spreads the more it continues to affect other organs.
I also remember that one of the things that God has helped us to bring to the awareness of people around us here is an end to stigmatization.
In those days people don’t want to talk about it because of stigmatization ,because of the reaction from the people ,because people tend to treat it like a death sentence, so, one of the key messages is that it is not contagious, cancer is not contagious ,so, the fact that you have a family member who has cancer doesn’t mean you are going to have it but it is hereditary, that is part of the essence of screening, if you are able to trace in your bloodline that there’s tendency of it, a young woman whose mother has died as a result of breast cancer the possibility of having it is higher than somebody who doesn’t have the history, so, that is why screening is important.
In those days they use to say ‘oo we don’t need to do screening until after 40 years’ but now we’ve had 15 years old with a breast cancer lump that was why we went all out, in fact we even had to go to secondary schools to catch them young but the good thing with the prostate cancer is that before 40 you are okay but once you are 40, it is compulsory for you to screen for prostate cancer on a yearly basis but we are trying to do the awareness, we are trying to create awareness that even at your 30 you are already conscious of it ,you know people don’t talk about it , I even realized that it is seen as a disease among the male elite , we find out that when they say ‘prostate cancer’ ,people will assume that the patient must be a well-to-do, well-traveled and well-educated person but unfortunately it doesn’t know whether you are educated or not, so, that’s why, we are going all out to create awareness and let people know about it.
You know Iam a grassroots person, I work, I believe we should do this not only in the metropolis but we are taking the message to the grassroots.
What are the lifestyle tips that you can suggest for people which can help them stay safe?
We know that people are not really finding things easy now and that is one of the things that we find challenging, we have a lot of people saying ‘ iku kan na lo mapa yan jare’ and you know they just say it carelessly and I do say to them that you know the unfortunate thing with this thing is that it is not like it will come and take the person’s life if that is what it does then we can say ‘iku kan lomapayan ojo to bade na lode’ but unfortunately it leaves people in pain and the pain is unbearable, if you have been around somebody who has a full- blown cancer you will not wish it for your enemies, I have seen it first hand , I have relatives, I have friends, one of my very close friends I lost her to breast cancer ,so, it is not the pain you want to wish for anyone, that’s why it is important for us to prevent, it is better not to have it or to catch it young so that you can nip it in the bud, therefore a healthy lifestyle, no matter how much things are, we know that food is quite expensive but you find out that even now everybody is going back to the olden days, eating more of vegetables, less processed foods, and recently the mother of the nation encouraged us to go back to our backyard farming, so, when we eat less of those things that had fertilizer, chemicals applied to them, because some of those risks, really are unavoidable we have to breathe air, the air is polluted already but the little things we can do like watching what we eat ,watching our fat intake, regular exercise, fruit and vegetables, which are things that you know, in those days , people walk a lot what we have discovered from the researches and some of the little works we have done over the years ,it wasn’t as if in those days they were not having the diseases, but it wasn’t so prominent because they were eating things straight from the farm not chemicalized foods , that’s why we are urging people to go back to nature, we have a lot of vegetables, fruits like ginger, turmeric and other things people are coming back to those things which are better than processed foods, I think everybody is coming back to that awareness and people are living a healthy lifestyle, you know one of the things that exposure, wealth and what we call modern life have caused is that we have failed to do what we should ordinarily do daily, in those days our mothers will trek to the farm.
I remember when I was young if you see where our church was, the church we were attending, sometimes I look at my mum and feel like ‘Why? There are churches around, why this one that is far from our house? You know, if you see the distance and we had to trek to the church, but now that we talk about physical exercise it is now making sense to me you know those were the things they do subconsciously, and it was a healthy lifestyle. but now it is a conscious thing we are doing it consciously ,so, it seems painful, because like now ‘Oh my goodness! For me to wake up in the morning and say I want to go to the gym’ it is a conscious thing, it comes with pain but, when I was in secondary school that you have to trek to school it was a lifestyle and that is the difference, now it is taking more from us but in those days during the time of our mothers , it was a lifestyle while going to the market they gist with people , they didn’t see it as a physical exercise, it was just their lifestyle which was healthy ,and that was why they lived up to 120,130 years which was healthy, but in our own case we are microwave generations ,I wake up in the morning to do one or two things, then I enter my car , my car drops me right at the front of the door I am sitting all days working, quite alright you know working on the computer, working on the laptop, I don’t have so much physical exercise that I do, but in those days you will find our mothers trekking to the market and church or visiting friends , now we all have fences we can even have a neighbor who we may not know for years it wasn’t like that because there were activities, they had activities and it was their lifestyle, those are the things we are now trying to do because we know the health advantages.
You know in those days in the evening the children will trek maybe from wherever your house is to the center of the village where somebody will tell them stories, so, those things were their lifestyles, but now it is only done because we consciously want a healthy lifestyle it is like prescriptions.
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Since you started the LEAH Foundation, you’ve concentrated on cancer prevention and other things has there been an instance that someone approached you to say ‘look there are traditional ways of addressing this, we have the herbs for this and that?
Yes, we have had such instances but what we try to do is to also collaborate with them, we don’t discard them but we also encourage them to create awareness about the dangers I remember that when we started, one of the things we had to do was to go through the traditional rulers to help us ,so that we can get things done especially when we were working on the maternal mortality issue in my early days in office , we wanted the women to do regular scan, so, we had to work with the traditional birth attendants, we will tell them that we are not saying a pregnant woman should not come and deliver her baby at your place but let her come for regular scan so that at least you will have an idea and the needed information about the baby ,so, we had to find a middle point to meet, because if we go directly it may not achieve our aims.
Did it produce desired results?
Yes, it did, in fact presently even at our diagnostic center we have some traditional birth attendants that refer their pregnant women to us for scan ,they just don’t base it on only what they do,okay we know that this baby is in the breech position ,so, even if I want to give you herbs I know what I am giving you , that was the approach that we also used for cancer, even though we encourage our people to be careful ,because we have had cases of people who will start orthodox with us they will start medical and sometimes they will just disappear and they will say they want to go natural, you know what, I was talking to somebody recently I know someone who was diagnosed with I think breast cancer ,she didn’t use any medicine but she used just the fruits and diet method but when we were talking I realized that it takes a lot of discipline to do it, the routine and the pattern must be religiously followed, so, for example if they say you have to blend two pieces of carrot , one cucumber and one teaspoon of turmeric, you have to take it like medication like at 2 pm, and another one at 4 pm , it is not a child play, it takes a lot of determination that is why we have fatalities ,I can’t say that ‘okay, alternative solutions’ , I have seen the woman, I have spoken to her , I have heard of other people I have read about them but this particular woman I have seen her, I sat beside her while she shared her testimony but it takes a lot of discipline, so, the question you will ask yourself is ‘can I do it? ,most people cannot do it because it takes a lot of patience because it is slower than the other one, and if you are not meticulous with it, if you miss it along the line it can worsen the situation, so, that is the thing with going natural but I have seen people share their testimonies.
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As the First Lady of Kwara State, you came up with the idea of LEAH Foundation and took a decision to focus on cancer, why cancer?
Okay, like you know I am a Christian and the cancer thing for me was like a divine assignment like a calling, you know by the grace of God I have a ministerial arm of what I do which is called ‘God’s Mercy Solution Ministry’, but the cancer project itself is a calling, it is an assignment from God, I remember how it all started just before oga’s inauguration we were in Abuja for the first meeting held at the villa with governors-elect ,so, I went to the market in Abuja to buy some items and I met somebody, one of our mummy elders from my church and we got talking and she was happy, and she congratulated me, just as I was about leaving her shop, she held me back and said ‘Lewa, please, as a governor’s wife, I want you to prayerfully consider it that out of the things you will do, please, just start something on the issue of cancer’ , I think she had just lost somebody, so ,she was still mourning her ,so, I just said ‘okay mummy’ but that kept ringing in my head, so, when we got into office, it was one of the things I was giving a serious thought and coincidentally one of my cousins came from America and we got talking and when I mentioned it to him ,he said ‘oh ,I can help you to ask around if I can get people to collaborate with you’ and when we were holding the third meeting and they came with the budget I said ‘ha abeg this thing is unattainable’ ,so, I said to him ‘Pastor’ , he is a pastor but he is my first cousin and I said ‘ha! let me go , let me just focus on the regular governor’s wife duties’ and that was the situation until reality dawned on me ,I lost someone who was like my sister, like my mother’s first daughter though not biological she was married to my cousin but she is very very dear to me , when I was in the north she was the one that took care, you know she is way older than us ,so, I just got a call one day and they told me she was at Alafia Hospital ,Ibadan she had ovarian cancer, before we say jack Robinson, less than a week she was gone, so, that was a big blow,I was still trying to take a breather from that when another thing happened ,I attended Kwara State Polytechnic, Ilorin, so, one of my friends that we were together in school and were very close, I just got a call one morning like that and my husband said ‘Omolewa, won ni ore e ni cancer’ and I responded that ‘awon wo losobe?’ ,it sounded strange to me, so, he explained that it was breast cancer, infact that one was like a big shock too and I had to ask the husband, it was because of me they relocated to Ilorin I said ‘bring her to Ilorin’ because I wanted to take care of her, so, they had to relocate the entire family and they all came to Ilorin. you know we have a teaching hospital here we can get the best doctors, but unfortunately the presentation was late, so, we tried, we tried and we tried in fact at one point she gave up ,you know some people told her there is an alternative way of treating it ,so, they introduced her to one bee stinging place because I wasn’t the one following her to the hospital one of my staff was the one doing that, so , I just asked her that where is so so person? How far with her treatment? She now said they had not seen her for a while, so, I was like ‘haha why didn’t you tell me? So, we started looking for her, by the time I got to locate her, I asked her ‘lagbaja, where have you been? What happened? She said someone introduced her to the traditional treatment; it was so pathetic, so, I asked her what did they do? She said they will put them in a room and release bees, so, I asked what was the rational for doing that? She said the bees will sting out the toxic, so, I got her back to reality and said ‘let us go back to the hospital why are you doing this to yourself? Sadly, in less than a week she was gone, so, at that point I knew God wanted me to do something about it.
I had lost two close people and the third one is my aunt who was living in our house in fact I had even started the cancer work before we discovered her own ,she lived with my mum in Ibadan, so, when she went to the hospital and they told her rather than telling my mum , she went to a prayer house I think mummy just stumbled on her one day and she just noticed that something was wrong and said ‘haha! what is this? and immediately she took her phone and called me you know am quite close to her they used to call me her daughter you know that was the painful part of the story for me, so, mummy just called me and said ‘you should call your aunty, I saw something, I hope it is not that thing that you are working on? ,so, I said they should go and bring her ,in fact when they brought her , we could only palliate , there was no longer an opportunity to fight it ,so, I knew then that it is the reality you know when God gives you an assignment, one of the things that will make you know is that He will put things on your way that will make your work easy, so, when those two deaths happened and it shook me I was in that process when I had a courtesy call from the Medical Women Association of Nigeria, Kwara State chapter ,they had the courtesy call because it was that time that a new method of checking for cervical cancer that is cheap and affordable was introduced and they opened the center at the teaching hospital, so, they said they wanted me to come and use my good offices to let people know that they had it ,you know this was something I was already giving serious thought ,while we were at that meeting I asked if it costs much to set it up and they said ‘no , I will only do this and that’ by the time they brought the budget , I knew that it was an opportunity to answer the calling ,so, I told them let us get things done , that was how we began the advocacy but when we started the advocacy we set up screening centers ,I wasn’t just talking and saying ‘go and sayewo’ I was talking and I had a place to direct them to for screening, so, the two went together because when we launched the advocacy we had 3 centers I opened three centers at the same time, yes, we had at Center Igboro ,we had at Cottage Hospital, Adewole we had at ehm ,I can’t remember the third one but it was three centers that I opened on the same day so as we are talking about it we had a place to direct people to and I also brought some of my friends to buy tokens, pay for people and this is one of the things we will be doing for men too because that day there’s going to be PSA test for men.
Free PSA test?
Yes, it will be done free that day , I am already getting in touch with people maybe I should use this opportunity to reach out to public-spirited and well-meaning kwarans and people that I know or have heard about their good works, I think by the grace of God over the years we have been able to prove to people that this is a divine assignment for me ,so I am reaching out to people you know to support this mission, I have a target of screening if possible like 20,000, 30,000 men from 40 and above, that is my target and I am reaching out to well -meaning kwarans ,political office holders and business organizations, we are getting in touch with big organizations as well to sponsor their staff not just their staff but other people too , so, I am trying to work on that.
Unfortunately the screening for PSA is not as cheap as the one for women, though screening for breast cancer is not cheap any more too, in those days when we started, it was just 200 naira but now the scan is about N8,000 and for PSA the scan is between N8,000 and N10,000 Iam hopeful that people will support this cause.
You are targeting 30,000 men?
Even more than that.
Do you have the required medical personnel to do this?
Oh, my goodness, yes, we do, by the grace of God, I have a full-fledged hospital here in Ilorin, it is not a small hospital and we have 3 diagnostic centers, LEAH Foundation has 3 diagnostic centers, we have in Taiwo ,we have one in GRA and we have another one in Muritala and you know we collaborate with others and we have a lot of volunteers like we have most times when we have this type of medical outreach programmes, you know there are people who don’t have the structure but have good hearts, so, they offer to help we have a lot of people who volunteer, not that we are relying on volunteers we have the manpower as well and we have all the necessary equipment. ,
So, you are urging well-meaning kwarans to support this cause by sponsoring people for screening or treatment?
Hopefully we will eventually do that like we did for the segments we were into before now, it is for us to have a pool of funds like if you find people who need further screening, the foundation can continue to help them to that stage of treatment.
For years now, your foundation has supported cancer patients and people who have been diagnosed with cancer do you feel fulfilled and are there challenges?
There have been two challenges ,one : finding committed people, people who have the right heart ,that’s one of the greatest challenges and probably finances ,but people have been there for us, my husband is my number one supporter, he won’t even sleep until he sees that I feel relaxed, once the vision comes and I can’t sleep ,he will not sleep too, so, he knows that ‘okay this woman has to run with this vision and I am grateful for the kind of man I married ,I think I married my own husband because I don’t think many men can actually marry me ,because I have so much inside of me and he has come to realize that ‘okay, this is God assignment for her’, which he honors in my life and you know that he supports me as much as God allows him to do ,so, I am so grateful to him , he has been my number one supporter and I have people I grew up with ,who will say ‘ Oh, that is Lewa for you’ I ,have always been like this it is just that I think as I am growing up and opportunities come my ways, it makes my kind of the works become broader and it is not only cancer thing that I do, I have a children reception home ,I have about 16 children that I am fully responsible for 100% they live under my roof and I have them in primary schools , secondary schools and even tertiary institutions, so, I have a children reception home that I run.
Also, one of the businesses under LEAH Foundation which is one of the mandates that God gave me is LEAH Water factory, which is basically for empowerment, we use it to empower people to assist a lot of women across the state, but it is just that the cancer thing is more pronounced- Team@orientactualmags.com Do you have any information you wish to share with us? Do you want us to cover your event or programme? Kindly send SMS to 08035023079, 09094171980 or get in touch via orientactualmag@gmail.com. Thank you
