By C. Don Adinuba
With the burial rites of Professor Ernest Ugo starting on Tuesday, July 22, at the Amadeo Events Centre in Enugu, the curtain is almost drawn on one of Nigeria’s most humane and selfless citizens ever. Ugo grabbed national headlines when he informed a scientific conference of homeopathic doctors of the successful delivery of a baby girl conceived through in-vitro fertilization (IVF) in his Calvary Hospital in Enugu in 1985. The hospital immediately saw a number of experts throng to it. They included the medical officers at the Japanese and American embassies in Lagos. The Anambra State chief medical officer, Dr George Okafor, wrote in his own handwriting how impressed he was with the medical facilities and the IVF procedure.
However, the Nigerian Medical Association (NMA) took umbrage at Ugo’s statement, claiming that he was not a medical doctor and did not possess the IVF equipment. It was a moment that saw the NMA behave like a militant trade union rather than a professional association dedicated to science and the truth. None of its officials went to the hospital, and even when they were confronted with the undeniable evidence of laparoscope and other equipment critical for the IVF procedure, they stuck to their gun. Their main grouse was that Ugo was a homeopath, and not an allopathic. The fierce struggle between the two medical traditions has lasted for centuries in different countries, even though Christian Hahnemann, the father of homeopathy, was a distinguished German allopathic doctor.
It was worse in Nigeria of the 1980s because there was no law regulating alternative medicine. Homeopathy wasn’t a great brand because many Nigerians, including poorly educated folks, capitalized on the absence of a regulatory framework to declare themselves homeopaths. My deep relationship with Dr Ugo and his family for decades was serendipitous. Even when John Balogun, Sunday Satellite editor, was saying flattering things about how Ugo was treating him free of charge, I was not keen. I went Calvary Hospital rather reluctantly because Okey Ndibe, with whom I am joined at the hip, according to Professor Bart Nnaji, suggested we go so as to justify the extra days he planned to stay in Enugu to his editors at The African Concord weekly magazine in Lagos.
When Okey told some medical doctors, including his relatives, of his plans to write a report on Ugo and his IVF, they laughed at him uncontrollably, saying Ugo was a witchcraft practitioner. So, we set out in expectation of shrines, metal gongs, fresh and dried animal blood and skin, camwood, pieces of white, red and black clothes, and, of course, individuals well practised in chanting glossolalia. You can imagine our shock at seeing a well-run modern hospital with laboratories and well-educated officers, including Ugo himself, tall, huge, debonair, well-travelled in Europe and was speaking Spanish and excellent Greek, in addition to advanced English. He addressed our queries and concerns with self-confidence, and took us around the hospital, including his research laboratory with state-of-the-art equipment.
Though everything in the lab looked esoteric to us, Ugo was passionate to explain it and the workings to us. We listened without understanding. As the detailed descriptive report in The African Concord was published, the then Minister of Health, Dr Emmanuel Nsien, set up a committee led by Professor TAI Grillo, formerly of the University of Ife medical school, to review the IVF claims. Most people who knew Grillo described him as an internationally recognized researcher and hardworking, but almost a sadist. They included Augustine Njoku-Obi, an internationally respected medical biology professor at the University of Nigeria Teaching Hospital in Enugu who was then the Nigerian Academy of Science president.
Joe Ikem Odumodu, a first-class pharmacy graduate from Ife who was then heading the Northern Regional office of May and Baker in Kaduna, had informed Okey that he was not optimistic that Ugo would receive a favourable review because of Grillo’s reputation. Well, Ugo didn’t. One of the reasons Professor Grillo gave was that Calvary Hospital did not have the required equipment. The report was published when Olukoye Ransom-Kuti had become the Minister of Health. The minister was reminded by journalists at his press conference that it was odd to claim that the hospital didn’t have the IVF equipment since all local and foreign experts who had visited the health facility had confirmed it’s available. Ransom-Kuti, a reputable paedetrics professor from an illustrious family well known for activism, retorted:
“You mean a government decision can now be challenged?” Irked that someone whose heroic mother vigorously challenged the colonial regime and his two younger brothers, Fela the maestro and outstanding activist and Beko the erstwhile NMA secretary general who led the organization to wrestle with the General Muhammadu Buhari military dictatorship, could utter such a strange sentiment because he was serving the General Ibrahim Babangida dictatorship, I crafted an article for The Guardian entitled “Dr Steptoe as Galileo”. In the article, I compared Ugo to Dr Patrick Steptoe, a UK gynaecologist who, together with Edward Roberts, became in 1978 the first person to deliver an IVF baby, and to Galileo Galilei, the Italian astronomer, physicist, philosopher, and mathematician who in the 17th century, following in the footsteps of Polish astronomer Copernicus, stated correctly that the Earth was spinning around the sun, and not the other way around as taught by the ecclesiastical authorities, and was consequently sentenced to death by papal inquisition.
The article enjoyed enthusiastic and wide reviews. Molara Ogundipe-Leslie, a literature professor at the Ogun State University and female activist who was a member of The Guardian editorial board, sought me frantically for the publication. “Grillo”, who was her colleague at the University of Ibadan, “is callous”, Molara declared. “He thought he was bigger than the entire teaching hospital”. A few minutes later, Dr Olatunji Dare of the University of Lagos who was also a member of the newspaper editorial board and an inimitable essayist with an encyclopaedic knowledge of events and people, was uncharacteristically so generous with praise for the article, adding:
“The Yoruba will never support Grillo. He ruined the careers of a generation of Yoruba medical students at Ife. He would tell fresh students in their first lecture with him that none would pass with distinction because none could be as brilliant as he, and he didn’t make a first class at Cambridge”. Okey and I were energized to continue with what Thomas Aquinas would call a just war. Meanwhile, Prof Ransom-Kuti had ordered the Anambra State government to close down Calvary Hospital and prosecute Ugo and his wife, a Greek gynaecologist. The Anambra State military governor, Group Captain Sampson Emeka Omeruah, who had been briefed comprehensively on the controversy by his principal secretary, Ugochukwu Ifesi, retorted: “The registration and deregistration of hospitals are a state affair.
Let’s see how the minister can shut down the hospital”. Amid the controversy, Ugo became one of the few Africans to join the American Fertility Society. A number of doctors like ABC Nwora, a gynaecologist, continued to visit the hospital privately, and were impressed. Yet, they dare not make their views known to the public for fear of NMA reprisals. Despite his attainments in fertility research, most people know that Ugo’s greatness was more in philanthropy. Over 70% of his patients were non-paying, though he had a couple of high net-worth patients in Lagos, Abuja and elsewhere who made it possible for him to remain in business.
Fiercely pro-life, he took the responsibility of the upkeep of children whose indigent mothers had approached him for their abortions. He trained hundreds of orphans and indigent people up to the university level. He gave out almost every kobo in his bank accounts and even landed properties in choice places in Abuja in his sick bed. May Ugo’s tribe multiply. Adinuba was the Anambra State Commissioner for Information and Public Enlightenment.
