“Am I going to watch my son die on the bed? His tummy is swollen. This scares me a lot,” the songstress, Stella Monye, cried as she opened up about her child, Ibrahim, who is battling for life.

“I’m stretched already. Money is not coming from anywhere. I want Nigerians to help me. I want them to see me through,” she said in a tearful voice.

The artiste, who was popular in her days and had hits such as “Oko mi ye” and “Ari go samba”, said, “my son must be alive. I expect those who can help to please do so. I can still work. I can still do my music, but my son has to be alive for that creativity to come back.”

Though she cannot put a figure to how much is required for the treatment, which she said owes much to the family missing appointments and other challenges, she added: “We have missed three appointments. Now that we have kept away, things have started going wrong. Sometimes, my son will tell me his bladder is shifting, an indication that he has not been properly examined for some time.

“Even when we were there, each time it seemed we were going to overstay, we went to a lawyer where we pay as much as $300 to extend our stay anytime; we can’t leave after surgery. We did that for a while before we came back to Nigeria.”

Her career was interrupted by a deeply personal crisis involving her son’s health. Her son suffered a severe accident when he fell from a water tank at age nine. Ibrahim damaged his left kidney, bladder and urethra when he fell off a scaffold while trying to adjust an overhead water tank in 1999.

He slipped and fell on a sharp object that lacerated his urethra. His mother was not around when the incident happened, but his grandmother rushed him to the hospital at Stella’s request.

Stella thought it was a minor case that could be dealt with at any hospital. The musician said she was in Abuja, rehearsing with others for the Nigeria ’99 theme song towards the hosting of the FIFA U-21 World Cup when it all happened.

Ibrahim was treated at the Ikeja General Hospital, but there was a relapse for which he has been in and out of medical emergencies within and outside the country. The initial surgeries were unsuccessful, leading to multiple procedures in different countries, including India, Georgia, and the United States (U.S.).

Since the incident, Stella has been helping Ibrahim, who lost his father in 1999, with eating, walking, and personal hygiene.

She has had to care for him through several surgeries, recoveries and as his condition deteriorated, he is permanently on a catheter and in constant pain. “And I have not really engaged in any money-making ventures that could fund such a procedure. I need everybody’s financial assistance now to get this done,” Stella said.

In 2001, a concert was held at the Excellence Hotel in Ogba, Lagos, to raise funds for his treatment. The concert was graced by a host of artistes, including King Wasiu Ayinde Marshal, KWAM 1, and others. The special guest was then the wife of the Governor of Lagos State, Oluremi Tinubu.

Proceeds from the concert were expected to take the boy abroad for treatment, but what she got was not enough.

Somehow, after the concert, Stella ended up taking the child to hospitals in Nigeria, because she didn’t have much funding at that point to go anywhere else. “We still went to a few hospitals that still cost us millions. But no result,”

She revealed: “All the surgeries done were either not well done or the surgeons didn’t have the experience to handle such a surgery.”

Stella added: “It was a complicated surgery. For somebody’s urethra to be severe. It was not skin. It’s muscles. It was difficult to put down the muscles together. So, it kept failing. The surgery kept failing until we got to that point where we now said okay, we are done with Nigeria. Let’s try elsewhere.”

She said: “We left for India through people’s help. That one failed, too. Maybe because the hospital in India didn’t have the experience for that kind of complicated surgery. So, we came back to Nigeria again and we started navigating, started looking for help, started looking for funds where possible to get the surgery done.

“After failed surgeries, over the years, particularly the one done in India in 2014, she, with other artistes, like K1, Daddy Showkey, Orits Wiliki, Onyeka Onwenu, Lagbaja, and Pasuma, held a road show to appeal for funds. The late Christy Essien-Igbokwe led other musicians to raise funds for the treatment.

She had to stop the campaign when it was discovered that many people were using it to fleece the public, including those in the Diaspora without remitting the money for her son’s treatment.

“Somebody now recommended Mount Sinai in New York, America. Before we went to Mount Sinai, we tried other places. We called friends, we even went to Tbilisi, Georgia, very close to Russia. In Tbilisi, the man couldn’t do it. The man said the body had been tampered so much and he would not embark on it. That if we had come when he fell, it would have been more like it. We came back and headed to New York through people’s help.”

According to Stella, “since 2018, we have been going to New York and coming until we got stuck. We didn’t have money to do anything again. Some people blamed me, asking why I didn’t look for a job there, and I answered how many $100-dollar jobs can I do to pay for the surgeries? The first surgery cost us $28,000. I’m not talking about logistics and others. The hospital didn’t house us. We paid for a lot of things.

“She is confident that something good is going to happen in the U.S. if the treatment is concluded as requested by the doctor. She said: “The New York experience has been great because at least, something people couldn’t do for 20 years, the guy was able to put the urethra together by using all parts of his body. They cut his intestines. They cut from his laps to his leg, removing some muscles; they used everything from his body. And the man warned us that he was not sure we would be able to embark on the project because it was not going to be an overnight result. He said it was going to be a gradual process. And he wanted to know whether we were equipped for it: Whether we had funding for it.” (The Guardian, but headline rejigged)

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