The Excluded Voices from Africa’s Sahel: Alternative Meanings of Health in Narratives of Resistance to the Global Polio Eradication Initiative in Northern Nigeria

ABSTRACT

Although previous inquiry into resistance to the polio vaccines in northern Nigeria has been launched from several disciplines, inquiry has been limited to the 2003 revolt and has rarely been informed by theory. This study drew on the culture-centered approach to health communication to argue that the exclusion of marginalized communities from decision-making by the Global Polio Eradication Initiative (GPEI) resulted in a vaccine resistance which found expression in health activism that engaged the local news media. To recover the excluded voices, this study examined community members’ narratives of resistance to the vaccines in Nigerian news from 2012 to 2018. Upon providing a backdrop for these narratives through a chronology of GPEI milestones in northern Nigeria developed from Nigerian newspapers, the study then engaged with 168 speech acts of resistance in Nigerian news to co-construct alternative meanings of health. Drawing on a local cultural meaning of the vaccines as covertly carrying out a Western family-planning agenda, narrators negligibly associated “family planning” with health. Narrators further articulated health as access to foods and as religious practice. These findings have implications for the inclusion of voices from sub-Saharan Africa in GPEI decision-making.

Notes

1. The “global South” is a geographically crude economic designation for low to middle income nations in Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, Eastern Europe, and Latin America. This contrasts with a “global North” designation for the high-income nations of North America, Oceania, and Western Europe (Mitlin & Satterthwaite, 2013; Shumate & Dewitt, 2008).

2. Described by Antonio Gramsci as a group that is marginalized by the ruling elite and elitist texts (Munshi & Kurian, 2007).

3. This time frame was chosen because 2012 marked a significant rise in media coverage of the polio vaccines due to the killings of two police officers in northern Nigeria who were guarding vaccination workers; furthermore, 2018 was the GPEI’s most recent deadline for the global eradication of polio.

4. Taylor and Cooren (1997) defined speech acts as statements that go beyond representing the social world to performing a social action.

5. Although polio immunization officials and religious leaders did not resist the vaccination campaigns, their 3^rd person news narratives bore witness to the acts and messages of vaccine resistance from community members of northern Nigeria.