The drama of Tivaoune (west), caused by a short circuit according to the first information, is the latest to highlight the shortcomings of the health system of this poor country.
It has prompted promises of modernization and investigations from the authorities, and calls for resignation from public opinion and the opposition.
President Macky Sall has declared three days of national mourning. His services announced that he was advancing his return from his trip abroad and would go to Tivaouane on Saturday. Authorities have announced an investigation.
« The scientific police are in the process of making material findings. We cannot comment on the real causes of the fire, » said prosecutor Abdoulaye Ba in front of a forest of cameras at the courthouse.
« Justice will be implacable against anyone whose responsibility will be engaged, » he promised. Not far from there, in front of the Mame Abdou Aziz Sy Dabakh hospital, a mother barely standing up calls out to a man whom she expects to tell her where her son Mohamed is, hospitalized there 10 days ago because he had « bodily ache » according to his father. « God made the best decision, » replied the individual, immediately taken over by the father, Alioune Diouf, a 54-year-old driver.
« You shouldn’t have told him that way, » reprimands Alioune Diouf, as his wife collapses.
Mohamed, baptized on Monday, was the couple’s second child. His mother went back and forth between the house and the hospital to breastfeed him. His father had come on Wednesday to bring his medicine. “The beds seemed fine to me,” he recalls. He was alerted by the media.
What exactly happened inside the enclosure painted green, inaccessible to journalists on Thursday, the level of surveillance of this establishment of relatively modest size and means remains to be established.
The newborns were gathered in the neonatal unit, perhaps in the same room, 11 or more according to the sources.
Anger growls
The fire reportedly broke out around 9:00 p.m. (local and GMT). It was caused by « a short circuit and the fire spread very quickly », said Mayor Demba Diop.
In front of the hospital or on social networks, accusations of negligence fuse. But the mayor assured on the spot that a midwife and a nurse were in the room. « There was a noise and an explosion, it lasted three minutes maximum. Five minutes later, the firefighters were there. People used fire extinguishers » but the products contained in the air conditioners accelerated the spread, a- he said. Both caregivers passed out but were revived, he said.
« There was no negligence, » he said.
Witnesses as well as the mayor indicated that a number of babies had been saved from the flames.
But eleven did not survive according to the authorities.
Cheikh Coundoul moved when he learned that a fire had broken out at the hospital where his niece had left her baby. « We couldn’t find anyone to talk to. It was when a lot of parents started complaining that the director told us that our baby had been consumed by fire, » he says.
He has not yet recovered the remains; he was « told that it is impossible because an investigation is open and it is up to the prosecutor to make decisions ».
But anger rumbled outside the hospital in a small group of anonymous women.
« penalties »
« It’s negligence. Leaving the children without anyone to watch them and they say that + it is God who willed it +. A mother takes the precaution of entrusting her child to someone, even when she goes to the toilet », one of them railed, while a man in his fifties invoked « the divine will ».
Tivaouane, about 40,000 inhabitants, is the stronghold of the Tidianes, one of the important Muslim brotherhoods which play an essential social role in Senegal.
The Caliph of the Tidianes, Serigne Babacar Sy Mansour, lamented the state of the hospital several months ago. The drama « was predictable so much the level of dilapidation had exceeded understanding », wrote his nephew Serigne Cheikh Tidiane Sy Al Amine in a tribune. He denounced the broken promises of raising the medical plateau while the hospital, according to him, serves a human pool of hundreds of thousands of people.
These are grievances often heard in recent months after a series of tragic events.
Four newborns had died in 2021 in a fire in a maternity hospital in Linguère (north).
On April 1, Astou Sokhna, a woman in her thirties who was nine months pregnant, died at the public hospital in Louga (north) after having, according to her relatives, waited in vain in very great suffering and for a twenty hours the caesarean section she was asking for.
« I hope that this time the sanctions will hit the top of an overall broken system, » tweeted former Prime Minister Abdoul Mbaye.
« More babies burned in a public hospital. It’s unacceptable Macky Sall », tweeted an opposition deputy, Mamadou Lamine Diallo.