News — Health care

Dr. Thakgalo Thibela is being hailed as one of South Africa’s youngest doctors, having graduated with a Bachelor of Medicine and Bachelor of Surgery from the University of Witwatersrand. According to the Health Practice Council of South Africa, Thibela is the youngest active female doctor in the country.

The 21-year-old woman is living her lifelong dream of being a doctor. She is helping to put smiles back on the faces of her patients.

“The gratitude patients have after receiving help brings me so much joy,” she was quoted by The Saturday Star. “Seeing smiles on patient’s faces after consultation or when they get discharged from the hospital is why I love this job so much. I’ve always wanted to help people and medicine has given me the platform to do just that.”

Thibela grew up in Violetbank, a rural village in Bushbuckridge, in Mpumalanga in eastern South Africa. Coming from a middle-class family, her dad is a manager at a local municipality while her mother is a primary school teacher. Her parents valued education and instilled in her the power of education at a very young age.

Having been educated through the public school system, Thibela is proud of her achievements. She has always been the youngest person in her class since high school after skipping grades. Thibela skipped grade 7 in primary school and enrolled at Lehlasedi High School where she barely spent a week in grade 9 and was promoted to grade 10.

During her high school graduation, a then 15-year-old Thibela had distinctions in seven out of eight subjects.

“I was very fortunate that the schools I went to (public schools by the way) promoted students they felt were doing well academically, so as a result I didn’t do Grade 7 and 9 and I also started school a year early which enabled me to complete matric at 15,” she told The Saturday Star.

At 16, all Thibela wanted to do was to be a doctor. Thus, during school applications, she chose medicine as her first choice. She was subsequently admitted to Wits University at the age of 16 where she enrolled for a six-year degree in the Bachelor of Medicine and Bachelor of Surgery.

Gaining admission to the university was her first time living away from her family and outside her village to the city. It was quite difficult readjusting and she had to deal with low self-esteem coupled with bullying from the city folks because of her thick village accent. She was also ridiculed by her university peers for not pronouncing certain English words the way most people pronounced them, a report by News24 said.

At a point, she felt out of place. Nonetheless, she had one goal and that was to finish medical school. She performed very well in school, earning her the Golden Key International membership, a recognition for students doing well academically. At 21, she has completed her Bachelor of Medicine and Bachelor of Surgery, making herself and her family proud.

She has been instrumental amid the COVID-19 pandemic, working on the frontline with her colleagues at Helen Joseph Hospital in Johannesburg, where she is doing her practical experiential learning.

Patients and doctors alike get fascinated by her skills and level of professionalism especially when they get to know she is 21 years old. In her second year of medical school, Thibela got intrigued by the human brain during a dissection practical and has hopes of specializing in neurosurgery sometime soon.

“The brain and nervous system have always fascinated me. If the brain stops working, whether your heart is still beating or not, you are considered dead.

“For me, the brain is the most important organ in the human body, and I would like to know more about it and help people who have a brain and nervous system lesions get better,” she said.

Thibela hopes to inspire others to chase their dreams as well, especially the young ones in her village.

The curse of Breton Woods Institutions, the United Nations Organization and the Western Powers is their irritating habit of describing poverty and economic as well as social challenges of Africa, Asia, and South (Latin) America without offering a solution.

It is evident in the history of development economics that the Western Powers and the Breton Woods organizations have always perpetrated this irritating kind of communication about the poor world without making any effort to suggest a solution that is implementable in terms of pulling Africa, Asia and Latin America out of the mire of poverty.

Any keen observer will not miss inferring that the west derives sadomasochistic joy from the stand-offish description of poverty in the third world; and indeed it is true that the West and the UN have described Africa’s poverty for a century, but so far there is no feasible or user-friendly solution suggested by the West as a way of dealing with poverty in Africa, Asia and Latin America. This observation is based on the recent UNFPA report that made an irritating statement about social problems of women in the third world by stating that, “Only half of women in developing world have body autonomy.”

The UNFPA report stated that “whether it’s sex, health care or using contraception, women in developing countries lack control over decisions affecting their bodies.” Yes, it is true. Women in Africa and other parts of the developing world lack choices over what happens with their own bodies, but does the UN have a good degree of moral authenticity to make public description of such preventable challenges that have been made unpreventable by dishonest political interactions across the world, a buck which stops at the table of the United Nations.

On April 14, 2021, UNFPA reported that half of women in 57 poor countries around the world are denied the freedom to decide on what to do with their own bodies. The report stated that women in the poor world don’t have autonomy of sex, contraception and health care. The report also stated that women in the poor world have no autonomy to prevent rape, forced sterilization, virginity tests and genital mutilation.

According to Natalia Kanem, the current head of the UNFPA’s sexual and reproductive health agency, “hundreds of millions of women and girls do not own their own bodies, their lives are governed by others, decision about their bodies are made by other people like partners, family members, society and government.” Natalia also reported that, “rape in the developing countries is not always prosecuted.”

In the report, Natalia further argued that COVID-19 pandemic has led to increasing sexual violence, more unintended pregnancies, and new barriers to health access, along with job and education losses in Africa and the developing world. Natalia’s UNFPA report also predicted that Africa and the developing world are going to experience an extra 13 million child marriages and another 2 million cases of female genital mutilation in the next decade as the pandemic stymies global efforts to end both practices.

However, Natalia’s UNFPA report praised in a glorious tone countries like Sweden, Uruguay, Cambodia, Finland and the Netherlands for achieving good level of gender equality. UNFPA praised governments of these countries for having had lead role to play by fulfilling obligations under human rights treaties, as well as altering social, political, institutional and economic structures that reinforce gender inequalities.

In a nutshell, the UNFPA report has just described, though by basing on very shaky evidence, how women in Africa and the developing world are prone to rape, FGM, early marriage, domestic violence, virginity test, forced abortion and other forms of gender-based oppression but it has not suggested any solution or institutional procedure that can be followed to prevent such kind of hostilities to the women of the poor world.

Critical outlook points out that UNFPA was also supposed to give a report on the social, economic and physical challenges of migrant women in America, Europe and other developed countries. And at the same time, UNFPA is also obliged to give us a reflexive report on the suffering of African women in countries like Congo as nothing else but the undoing of the UN and the developed world.  Maybe this article must also mention that poverty is at the center of gender based autonomy of women in Africa, yet poverty in Africa has been reinforced by unstable security. And it is also indubitable that the recurrent wars and endemic poverty in Africa are a reflex of the political behavior of the UN and the Western powers on the global stage. 

No one can doubt factual decorum in the argument that Poverty in Africa was solvable, but Western powers chose to play tricks with it. This is why China has been embraced after displaying evidence of being capable to help Africa fight poverty through improving the quality of infrastructures in Rural Africa. One good with China is that it has never wasted time describing poverty in Africa, but it has always been involved in practical warfighting poverty in Africa through building roads, hospitals, schools, dams, gabions, boreholes, irrigation infrastructures and electrical power generating infrastructures and so on. At least this will help African women to access food with dignity, a substructure on which they can base autonomy to make choices about their bodies. Otherwise, it is not easy for a woman to have autonomy of choices in relation to her body when she is operating on an empty stomach.

When Darryl Sharpton first joined the National Football League (NFL) in 2010, he was tipped as one of the promising stars to look out for. Unfortunately, injuries got in his way and he had to end his career in 2015. 

“I was miserable,” he said of his series of injuries that derailed his career in an interview. “I couldn’t take it.” He finished his career playing 47 games for the Texans recording 176 tackles and one sack. 

After quitting the NFL, Sharpton went into entrepreneurship, establishing e-commerce furniture companies Edloe Finch in 2017 and Albany Park in 2019 with his wife Jessica. He told CNBC that his companies have Amazon and Wayfair as wholesale buyers.

According to Sharpton, Albany Park is a sofa in a box brand that ships to buyers within three days. He and his wife design the furniture and have them manufactured in China and Malaysia. Edloe Flinch, on its website, says its “mission is to manufacture chic modern furniture without the typical industry mark-ups. Edloe Finch operates exclusively online with no retail stores, showrooms or salespeople — passing the savings to you!” 

Going into entrepreneurship, especially within the e-commerce space, was nothing out of the blue for Sharpton. It was a passion he had since his days at the University of Miami where he studied finance. He got an opportunity to sell furniture after purchasing a sofa from Craigslist.

After five years playing in the NFL, there is no gainsaying that the former linebacker is supervising a thriving business. He witnessed a boom in online sales occasioned by the coronavirus pandemic as many countries and states imposed lockdown measures to contain the spread of the virus.

Last year, Sharpton said his companies estimated to make $10 million in sales, up from $3.9 million in 2019. However, because of the pandemic, the revenue projection was pushed to $20 million. It could reach $100 million in 2022, he said. “With Covid-19, the online shopping trends have accelerated five years into the future,” Sharpton told CNBC. “We happen to be in a good space at a good time.”

The road has not been smooth sailing for the former NFL player. He recalled facing discrimination and racism while attending furniture fairs. He remembered taking an unusual step to use his wife’s face on the site so that his business wouldn’t suffer because he is Black. His wife is Asian and White, and a former oil and gas consultant.

“Today, I can’t imagine being in that place mentally but definitely at the time I was [unsure] if people would feel comfortable with buying furniture from me where they would maybe question everything – the quality, the validity,” Sharpton said.

The 34-year-old is looking to expand his business by accepting investors although he is torn between potential acquisition offers. 

A deal has been reached between pharmaceutical giant Johnson & Johnson and African Union (AU) members states to make 400 million doses of vaccines available to Africa over the course of this year and the next.

J&J announced that the vaccines will be delivered to the African Vaccine Acquisition Trust (AVAT), a special purpose initiative set up to secure vaccines on behalf of African countries. Some 220 million vaccines will be delivered in the third quarter of this year, followed by 180 million in 2022.

The vaccine made by J&J is good for one-shots. As such, the provision by the company will go a long way to make it possible for the AU to reach its target of 60% population inoculation by the year’s end. Africa has about 1.2 billion people and most countries have already started vaccination programs.

South Africa was a destination of four different vaccine trials, including J&J’s. At the beginning of the year, South Africa’s President Cyril Ramaphosa, who until recently was chaiperson of the AU, indicated that his country intended to lead the charge for vaccine equity on behalf of Africa.

South Africa hoped to come to an agreement with Johnson & Johnson to obtain affordable vaccines for the country and others in Africa. But while Johnson & Johnson undertook a trial in the Rainbow Nation, it made no promises of donating or selling vaccines to South Africa or any other country on the continent. J&J is said to begin manufacturing its vaccine in South Africa and will make about 300 million before the end of 2021.

Vaccines for many African countries comes via the COVAX program, a World Health Organization (WHO) initiative intended to ensure an equitable distribution in the face of global competition. Other donations by China and Russia see additions of the Sinopharm and Sputnik V respectively in wide usage.

But speaking after the announcement of the deal, John Nkengasong, director of the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention. called the addition of J&J “very good programmatically” and revealed that it would likely cost $10 a dose.