In a very long thread Tunde Onakoya made via Twitter, the chess master stated how he’s been battling this challenge for 27 years. In a summary, he wrote:
“He has organized a number of interventions for children across slums in Lagos state including Majidun, Makoko and recently, Oshodi. I’ve lived with excruciating pain in my right leg for 27 years. I wasn’t born this way but something happened that changed the trajectory of my life. One of the things we don’t talk about is the fear of confronting what may be a worsening health condition. Shortly after I was born in 1994(i was 9 months old), I got really sick. This came at a time when my parents struggled to even put food on the table. There was no money to take me to hospital and as my condition worsened, my mum took me to a local nurse who gave me a bad injection without diagnosis.
My mom told me at the time that she used to hawk sachet water at oshodi underbridge with her twin sister. With time, I started walking again and had a pretty normal childhood until I was about 10 years old. Some damage had been done partly due to measles and the bad injection from a nurse. As a child, I was suffering from an extreme pain in my right leg. My parents never took me to the hospital no matter how sick we were, it was always local herbs. The pain got worse because no one paid attention to what was wrong. There were nights when I was crippled with pain and contemplated suicide. Now I know that if my parents were Educated or wealthy, maybe they would have handled things differently.
I had a slight LLD condition caused by trauma and ACN(Avascular Necrosis) This was not a Doctor’s report, it was based on my own research, the night fundamentally changed my life. I decided to pursue the CIS project with all the strength I had left. I wrote down these words- “For the next 10 years, this frail body will house the greatest spirit humanity will ever know”. I’ve lived my dream of giving children in poverty a fighting chance and an opportunity to find their place in the world again. While I was in Crossriver for the girl child project, I sprained my knee playing football and the pain came back. After 27 years of neglect, there’s a good chance I’ll need a full hip replacement.
“I can no longer live in denial. I’ll probably need to start speaking to a few Orthopedic surgeons and seriously consider my options for surgery next year. Maybe I’ll need to take a gap year to focus on the surgery, write a book, take on more speaking engagements.”
Credit: Tunde Onakoya/Twitter