Ade Adepitan interview and video clips

12 August 2013

Please scroll to the bottom of the page for (embeddable) video clips from Ade’s documentary.

 

Ade Adepitan is something of a polymath. He’s been a Paralympic medallist at basketball, a tennis player, an actor, a children’s TV presenter, a charity worker and campaigner, a motivational speaker and Olympic ambassador. Last year, he was a presenter on Channel 4’s BAFTA-winning Paralympic coverage, and has branched out into documentary presenting. Here, he discusses his latest documentary, Ade Adepitan: Journey of My Lifetime  (Channel 4, Monday 19 August, 8pm) looking at polio in his native Nigeria. Ade also looks back at the Paralympics almost one year on.

 

You’ve made a documentary for Channel 4 that’s very personal to you. Explain what Ade Adepitan: Journey of My Life is all about.

It’s very personal, because it follows me as I go back to the country of my birth and meet up with my family, but it’s also personal because I’m looking at the polio situation in Nigeria. It’s one of only three countries in the world where polio is still a risk – the others are Afghanistan and Pakistan. So I travelled back to find out why Nigeria has this problem, particularly when there are so many other countries in Africa that have more problems and less money, but have managed to eradicate polio. And that’s personal because I contracted polio when I was living in Nigeria. So this is also a look, for me, at what my life could have been like if my parents hadn’t made the decision to bring me over to the UK.

 

Why is it that, in African terms, a relatively wealthy nation like Nigeria has come to be one of the last polio hotspots on the planet?

It’s complicated, there are a number of different issues that have come together. Nigeria is, as you say, relatively wealthy, and polio is quite easy to eradicate, because it’s an oral vaccine. Polio is now mainly found in the north of Nigeria, in places like Kano and Sokoto. And some of the communities are very hard to reach, especially around Sokoto. Some f them are nomadic, they cross the border between Niger and Nigeria a lot. So it can be hard for vaccinators to find them, and then when they do, it’s difficult to determine which of them has alreay been vaccinated. But on top of that, back in 2003, an awful rumour was spread in Nigeria saying that the polio vaccine contained a contaminate that caused children to become infertile, and that it was a conspiracy to restrict the population in Nigeria. These rumours spread, and the government decided to stop the polio campaign. The numbers had dropped very, very low, so the government suspended the campaign for nine month while the vaccine was looked at. And I think some of the Islamic groups said they wanted the vaccine to be made by Muslim doctors. So in that nine month period, the numbers shot up to ridiculous levels. And Nigeria still hasn’t recovered from that nine month period.

 

What steps are being taken to change the situation?

It’s a combination of education, publicity, government action, a strategic, targeted approach, and help from UNICEF and the WHO and the Gates Foundation. They’re now using satellite technology for the hard-to-locate communities. They’ve also got to tackle the fears that still persist from that rumour ten years ago. The government has to change the image of the polio vaccine. Ad there are also some parts of the population who have something called vaccine fatigue – you sometimes have to come back three times for the vaccination to be effective, and some people are just fed up with people constantly trying to give them vaccines. I think there is confusion and mistrust, people ask “How come the government is so clean to give us the polio vaccine but they can’t give us clean water, they can’t help us with sanitation.” They need to win the people’s trust before they can really solve this issue.

 

Is it a battle that will be run? Is it a realistic prospect to say that polio will be eradicated forever?

I think it’s not a case of saying it’s a battle that will or won’t be won. It’s a battle that has to be won. What I witnessed when I was out there is just how tough the life of a child with polio is. Their life chnces go down drastically. As an able-bodied child living in Nigeria, things are tough. In some of these areas in northern Nigeria, they have open sewage running through their front yard. The floor is so dirty, and yiou have these children with polio, who don’t have a wheelchair or mobility aid, who are literally crawling through all this faecal matter on the floor. They can’t go to school because the public transport system doesn’t cater for disabled kids, and even if they could get to the schools, the schools themselves are inaccessible.

One of the people that I met out there was a really interesting young lady called Zeinab. She had to really struggle to convince her father to allow her to go to school. Generally, if you’re a girl and you have polio, you don’t go to school, you don’t receive an education, you don’t get a job, so you live below the poverty line. And she didn’t have a wheelchair, so she crawls everywhere. She works as Head of Production in the TV station in Sokoto. It was mind-boggling.

 

Why were you not immunised against polio as a child?

That’s a really good question. I spoke to my mother about this recently. I suppose it was a question I’d kind of avoided – it was all quite complicated and awkward, but after I got back from Nigeria I spoke to her. And she said to me that at the time, you needed three injections, and I’d had two of them, and I was a few days away from having my final injection when I contracted polio. I was just very, very, very unlucky.

 

Soon after you got back, nine polio workers were shot dead in the region where you’d just been filming…

Yeah, the sad thing about that was that they were innocent people who were trying to do good in the country and help people and change people’s lives. They lost their lives for something that was just absolutely ridiculous. It was totally senseless. There but for the grace of God… That could have been us. While we were out there, we were complaining that our schedules hadn’t worked out, because we were hoping to film the vaccinations happening. We were meant to be with those guys. But our schedules didn’t align, and we had to come back. And a week later we hear that, where we would have been, the nine of them were shot. It’s just devastating.

 

The terrorist organisation responsible, Boko Haram, is very active in northern Nigeria. Could you sense the tensions when you went up there?

It was interesting, because when we arrived in Lagos, we just found it to be a crazy, vibrant place, but you never really felt in any danger. You might get harassed a little bit, but that was it. But then we heard about the attempted assassination of the Emir of Kano, we’d heard of the school being burned down, and of the policemen being shot. And we had to make some very serious calls back to Channel 4, speaking to the lawyers, trying to get security advice as to what to do. So we knew there was tension. And when we arrived in Kano the decision had been made that we could only spend three days there. And there was a curfew in Kano anyway, but we made the decision that we had to finish filming every day by 5pm at the latest. We didn’t ant to be out after dark. Did we feel the tension up there? Probably not. The people we were up there with were really cool. They kept us away from all of that stuff. But we knew. Motorbikes are a big deal in Nigeria, and in Kano people were no longer allowed to take passengers on their motorbikes because the shootings and assassinations had been carried out by guys on the back of motorbikes. So there was some serious stuff going on, but generally people were just trying to live their lives day to day. It’s all so strange though, because generally the form of Islam that’s practised in Africa is very peaceful. It’s quite alarming that violence is starting to rear its ugly head in Nigeria, and it’s bad timing for polio. But the plan is still to eradicate polio for good in the next five years. I want to be there, on the day when Ban Ki Moon makes that announcement that children of the world will no longer have to fight this disease.

 

What was the thing that most shocked you while making this documentary?

The poverty. And in particular the poverty of people with disabilities. If you’re poor and disabled in the UK, you have a better life than a poor able-bodied person in Nigeria. Now imagine what the life of a poor disabled person is like in Nigeria. In Sokoto there is just raw sewage flowing past people’s houses. People are drinking yellow water. Kids have no access to education. It’s so mind-blowing, it’s like medieval times. There was a place in Lagos called the Destitute Institute, where they put anyone who has a disability. There are about 3000 people living in this small compound, and they all had disabilities. They had the people with leprosy staying in one part, the people with polio in another part, blind people in another part. It was really, really strange, especially coming off the back of the Paralympics. On the flip side of this, there were some amazing stories. I met a group of guys who lived under a flyover, who’d travelled down from Kano. They all had polio. They’d managed to save their money together, and they’d got enough to buy a tuk-tuk [a motorised rickshaw]. And they’d used their ingenuity to adapt the tuk-tuk so that it could be ridden by people with disabilities. So one if the guys had become a taxi-driver in the tuk-tuk, and he earned a load of money, and they used that money to buy another tuk-tuk. And over a couple of years, they’ve managed to buy four or five tuk-tuks, and that’s how they now make a living. That kind of ingenuity and entrepreneurship was really heart-warming.

 

They’ve also created a new sport, haven’t they?

Yeah, these guys had created para-soccer. They’ve made these skateboards, and they wear flip-flops on their hands and play football. It’s a dynamic and fast-flowing sport. They’ve set up their own league, contacted other people with polio in Lagos, and they’ve set up a league. We went along to film a match, and suddenly they had about a hundred people there just to watch it. That’s where they can show people all the positive things they can do, and it gives them strength and confidence. So in amongst the terrible stories there were heart-warming stories and a lot of humour.

 

That seems like a good moment to move on to the Paralympics. We’re almost a year on from the games. How did it feel to win a BAFTA for the coverage?

Winning a BAFTA was just a complete shock, it was totally unexpected. I didn’t go into this whole thing with winning a BAFTA in mind. It was more to promote Paralympic sport, and increase the profile of Paralympians, and help change perceptions. But to then go on and win a BAFTA was like the icing on the cake. It was the perfect moment in the perfect storm. You could see when we won the BAFTA that we were all completely shocked. It is brilliant, because it shows that people are now realising that Paralympic sport is something that should be taken seriously, and something that we are all incredibly proud of.

 

What do you think the legacy of the games has been in this country?

Statistically, LOCOG did a survey after the Paralympics, and that showed that one-in-three people in the UK had changed their perceptions of disability as a result of the Paralympics. That’s a major legacy, that people are now looking at disabled sport and at people with a disability in a different light. For me, on a personal level, at my basketball club we’ve suddenly had an influx of youngsters wanting to play wheelchair basketball. We had an open day, and we had 20m kids, all under the age of 15, who came to try out the game. That’s more, in one day, than we’ve had in ten years. That’s off the back of the Paralympics. And I also think that young disabled kids, their perception of themselves has changed. In my day, we played Paralympic sport but we kept it a little bit secret, we were this underground sport that no-one spoke about. I never thought that I’d have a TV career, I didn’t think about making money from my sport. But now these kids are looking at people like David Weir and Hannah Cockcroft and Richard Whitehead, seeing these guys getting MBEs and OBEs and sponsorships, and they’re thinking “That could be me.” That’s just a wonderful, wonderful legacy for me, that disabled kids think they have as much opportunity as able-bodied kids.

 

What was your own highlight of the Paralympics?

Probably two moments – the opening ceremony was spectacular – to see so many people supporting the Paralympics, and when Team GB came out, the cheer felt like the whole nation was lifted. And to see the emotion on the faces of the Paralympians when they heard that, it was just fantastic. Back in my day, when you competed in the Paralympics, there were very, very few people who came out and watched you. So my second highlight was watching the first morning in the Olympic Stadium, and see it full to capacity for a qualifying session. You only have to go back to Atlanta, and you look at how many empty seats there were during a main evening session. To fill a stadium for a Paralympic sport was unheard of. So for me, that just made me think “We’ve finally arrived. We’ve made it. We’re at a stage where we can never afford to go back.”

 

Ade Adepitan: Journey of My Lifetime is on Channel 4 on Monday 19 August at 8pm.