How Nigerian activists fought corruption — and saved children's lives
By Vince Beiser. To find more stories that show how citizens have used data to hold their governments to account, go to one.org/followthemoney
At first, no one knew why the children of Bagega were dying. In the spring of 2010, hundreds of kids in and around the northern Nigerian village were falling ill, having seizures, going blind, many of them never to recover. A Medecins Sans Frontieres team soon discovered the cause: gold, and lead.
With the global recession sending the price of precious metals soaring, impoverished villagers had turned to mining the area’s gold deposits. But the gold veins came mingled with lead, and as a result the villagers’ low-tech mining techniques were sending clouds of lead-laced dust into the air. The miners, unknowingly carrying the potent toxin on their clothes and skin, brought it into their homes where their children breathed it in. The result was perhaps the worst outbreak of lead poisoning in history, killing over 400 children in Bagega and neighboring villages in Zamfara state.
In response, the Nigerian government declared it would clean up the lead-infested topsoil and provide medical care to the stricken children. But by mid-2012, there was no sign of the promised funds.
The Nigerian public sector is ranked as one of the world’s most corrupt by Transparency International. But this time, digitally-savvy activists with the group Connected Development (CODE) stepped in to make sure the children of Bagega got what was coming to them.
A group of young Nigerians founded CODE in 2010 in the capital of Abuja with the mission of empowering local communities to hold the government to account by improving their access to information and boosting the reach of their voices. “In 2010, we were working to connect communities with data for advocacy programs,” says CODE co-founder Oludotun Babayemi, 32, a former country director of a World Wildlife Fund project in Nigeria. “When we heard about Bagega, we thought this was an opportunity for us.”
In 2012 they launched a campaign dubbed “Follow the Money Nigeria” aimed at bringing pressure on the government to release the promised funds. “Eighty per cent of the less-developed parts of Nigeria have zero access to Twitter, let alone Facebook, so it’s difficult for them to relate their stories,” says Babayemi. “We collect all the videos and testimonies and take it global.” CODE members travelled to the lead-afflicted area to gather information. They then posted their finding online, and publicized them with a #SaveBagega hashtag, which they tweeted to members of the government, local and international organizations, and the general public. A senator hosted a 48-hour tweet-a-thon to support the campaign. In December, Human Rights Watch got involved, launching a social media campaign urging people to write on President Goodluck Jonathan’s official Facebook page: “President Jonathan, why won’t you release the money you promised in May to clean up poisonous lead in Zamfara? Children are dying and your government’s failure to act is putting more children at risk”.
By January of 2013, the campaign had reached about one million people, and dozens of media outlets had picked up on the story. At the end of that month, the federal government released the $5.3 million it had promised to clean up Bagega. CODE followed up to make sure the lead remediation actually happened, making monthly trips to the region. By July of 2013, they report, the cleanup was complete and over 1,000 children had been screened and enrolled in lead treatment programs. Bagega’s health center has also been refurbished and its roads improved, says Babayemi.
“There are thousands of communities like Bagega,” says Babayemi. “They just need someone to amplify their voice.”
CODE has stayed busy since. In addition to initiatives monitoring funds for education and flood victims, in January they launched a campaign to track a government program that promises to spend $50 million to buy and distribute 750,000 clean-burning cookstoves and 18,000 “wonderbags” to rural Nigerian women. The wonderbags — portable slow cookers that require no electricity — and the stoves are meant to replace open, indoor cooking fires, the smoke from which is estimated to kill over 95,000 Nigerian women each year, according to the World Health Organization.
CODE is keeping tabs on the program’s progress by filing requests under Nigeria’s Freedom of Information Act, meeting with government officials, and keeping in touch with other stakeholders. “It is not news that previous funds provided by the Government (Federal, State and Local) for purchase of clean cooking technologies disappeared before they reach beneficiaries,” the group’s website warns. As of late June, only about fifteen percent of the funds had been released to contractors to actually provide the stoves and bags, and the Ministry of Environment was refusing to provide CODE with information about how those contractor were chosen. “We are skeptical about what will happen to the rest of the money,” says Babayemi. The group is keeping a close eye on the program, ready to launch another social media campaign if it fails to deliver.
