Over 500 physically-challenged residents of Angwa Guragu in Karonmajiji community along Airport Road, Abuja, claim they face difficulty in accessing healthcare.

The residents, alongside their able children and relatives numbering over 3000 told IP2N they live in fear, especially at night, should they have any problem with their health.

They said since they were brought into the community called Disabled Colony, a decade ago, government was yet to build them a health facility.

Most of the disabled were assembled by the Federal Capital Territory Administration in 2006 and settled at the community, with the aim of making life more comfortable for them, and apparently minimize the spate at which they beg within the municipal area of the city at the time.

Speaking when Ipledge2nigeria visited the community recently, Secretary to Physically-challenged chiefs in Abuja, Mohammed Dantani, said: “As you can see here, we don’t have dispensary. We are appealing to the NGOs, the government, to see that we have this challenge here. Let them see that we have a dispensary here. We do suffer a lot. We have to our people to Wuse, Asokoro and Maitama General Hospitals. And, from here to those hospitals, it is more than four kilometers. Movement is very difficult for us. We don’t have cars. We do contribute money together to see that these women have relief.”

He said within the last two years, about 30 mothers and children had died in the community because they did not have any health facility in the colony.

One of the mothers in the community, Hadiza Nafiu, a mother of five said she had never visited hospital since she got married. She never had antenatal at any health facilities, and claimed to deliver her babies in her room without any aid. But, what is expected to be her sixth baby, a six-month-old foetus is making her sick. She said she feels dizzy always.

Married to a physically-challenged spouse, Nafiu had all her babies at the colony.

Another mother in the colony, Rabi Mustapha, said the condition of people in the community makes them vulnerable to being victims of various bad activities, including burglary, at the colony.

While speaking on the challenges mothers face in the village, she said only Gwarimpa hospital takes good care of the disabled in the city, but that others look down on them.

She explained that people in the community feel too sad to see women or children die among them. “Somebody will be sick, within hours the person will die because they will not take the person to the hospital. If they take these people to the hospital, they know the kind of drugs to give them. Most people here believe in self-medication, and in no time, you see children die.

“We have been crying that government should build us a clinic. This is because if something happens to us, even though in the night, we can quickly move in there,” she said.