Let us listen to Kikwete on cancer screening

On March 23, 2015, I came off a community centre in the west end of Toronto called Parkdale, a community that had endured gentrification not many years ago.

Written by MORRIS DC KOMAKECH

Here, I had worked with a marginal group of immigrant women from Asia on cancer screening and prevention. The incidence of death from breast and colorectal cancers in Ontario is high, although lung cancer is the number-one killer.

Obviously, we will point a finger at the high consumption rate of industrial tobacco in this country but there are many risk factors to cancer, including lifestyle, which we could manage.

Our focus is on lifestyle modification as an essence of behavioural change approaches in public health. While here, an email notification went off my phone at 12 noon. It was from my vivacious colleague and an internationally-celebrated HIV-access-to-treatment advocate, Henry Luyombya.

He had shared with me a 52-minute video clip of Tanzanian President Jakaya Mrisho Kikwete’s speech on his stage 1 prostate cancer treatment in the US, in November of 2014.

I stopped for a few minutes to listen to the video in the chilling -10oC cold at midday. I was moved! In my entire life, I had never heard any ruling president in Africa speak so freely and dedicatedly to his fellow citizens about his ailment.

Often, when a president is ill, we hear that he has gone on vacation. His death announcement in a foreign country comes afterwards. This is because African leaders have projected this false image of immortality, might, and infallibility.

The key message that the Tanzanian president gave to his listeners was simple but powerful, “please, wafanye ukaguzi wa afya kila mwaka.” Meaning: “Please let them perform annual medical check-up.” Period! We should listen to President Kikwete attentively.

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