Ololade Olatunji
The coronavirus aka COVID-19 affirms the rabid assertions of Nigerian nature. The virus presents Nigeria as a food for worms.
Faith advocates describe it as a divine punishment for our mortal sins, a viral whiplash mimicking God’s plague on wayward Israel. Atheists argue otherwise. Liberals, scientists, common sense proponents, health experts and political pundits moot dangerous versions of relative truth, arguing that Nigeria would soon be overwhelmed by the disease, because she ignores the strife of contraries that births her plummet down dystopia’s steep ravine.
The chickens have come home to roost. The depth of decline of the country’s health system is best illustrated by President Muhammadu Buhari’s penchant for medical tourism abroad at the inception of his administration.
The President, like the very few wealthy Nigerians and privileged public officers, who could afford it, embarked on recurrent trips abroad for medical care. There is no gainsaying Mr. President sought the benefit of state-of-the-art health facilities overseas, necessity persistently denied to the Nigerian citizenry.
Even as the nation’s public health centres deteriorated, several governors and lawmakers brazenly hopped on a plane to receive treatment for health issues, from the mundane to the severe.
As the malady persisted, the press, presumably the last hope of the common man, answered differently to the miseries of the downtrodden. Driven by a fixation for politics and desperation to meet the bottomline, a large swathe of the mainstream and digital media scorned the grisly narratives of the citizenry to focus on politics and gossip as prime time news.
Thus we heard little about the failing health system and its impact on the people. Save a handful of media, the majority focused on illusions. They fed the people comforting myths, often from the perspective of the government and big business.
The corridors of power thus became our Versailles, from where prominent journalists relaunched their practice as government courtiers. Driven by hunger pangs and a lust for the good life, most TV pundits and supposed leader writers, learnt to beguile the citizenry by the hollow stagecraft of political theatre.
They gifted the powerful with a fawning forum mimicking a critical rostrum. At the same time, they pretended to have investigated and vetted government claims of efficiency. It was a dirty quid pro quo. The journalists got access to the elite as long as they faithfully doctored their analyses and reports to suit government agenda.
The culprits forgot that tragedy has a revolving door through which they too, must travel, given their complicity in the poor governance of the nation’s health sector, among others.
Before the advent of COVID-19, it was hardly surprising to see supposedly well-to-do journalists, brag like their peer in other disciplines, about their medical tourism abroad. “I just came back. I went to London for medical check-up,” they would say. Characteristically, they saw nothing wrong with the ruling class’ inordinate junketing abroad for “medical check-ups.” Hence public officers squandered public fund on reckless medical tourism abroad. Some had the effrontery to add their relatives, concubines and commercial sex workers, often patronised by them, as beneficiaries of such reckless spending.
Enter COVID-19 and Nigeria undergoes a moral reset. The coronavirus is a status leveller; hence its affliction of President Muhammadu Buhari’s Chief of Staff, Abba Kyari, the Governor of Bauchi, Bala Mohammed, and former Vice President Atiku Abubakar’s son, Mohammed, among others.
The sudden death of a former Managing Director of Pipelines and Products Marketing Company (PPMC), Suleiman Achimugu, who was reportedly the first to die of the dreaded coronavirus in Nigeria has incited morbid fear around his former base in Abuja and the nation’s seat of power.
Achimugu, who reportedly died over night from the virus in Abuja, was said to have returned from the United Kingdom two weeks earlier.
Suddenly, the nation’s ruling class have bitten the humble pie. They can no longer embark on reckless medical tourism abroad as their favourite destination points are currently hot-spots of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The truth has dawned on them in a moment of eternal damnation; they and their families are suddenly at the mercy of the health systems they deliberately neglected in savage fits of fiscal and official irresponsibility.
The consequences of their actions, were hitherto, exclusively borne by the impoverished citizenry, who suffered dearth of quality medical care due to medical braindrain. According to conservative estimates, about 2,000 doctors have departed Nigeria over the past few years, for greener pasture abroad. Many have blamed the exodus on poor working conditions, government insensitivity and illiteracy in health administration.
The figures are startling; only four percent of Nigeria’s budget is allocated to health annually. While the annual healthcare threshold per person in the United States (US) is $10,000, in Nigeria it is just $6, according to an Al Jazeera report.
A senior nursing staff at a Lagos tertiary health facility lamented to me, recently, that, aside the inadequacy of medical doctors, the hospital also suffers a dearth of adequate nursing and support staff.
She lamented that her medical facility assigns two nurses to 15 to 20 patients. “How do you expect them to work effectively? I have to walk the length and breadth of the hospital taking patients to theatre, receiving patients from the theatre, admitting patients and attending to daily callers. We nurses also have to sweep and mop the hospital floor by ourselves, due to lack of health attendants (janitors). We shouldn’t be doing such work but we have no choice since there is just one health attendant serving about eight wards. As a nurse, you won’t leave the unattended wards to stay unkempt.
“There is also persistent failure of electricity supply. Imagine having to work with torchlight in a hospital ward. Most times, we resort to the use of torches to operate in our hospital wards due to epileptic power supply, and this usually happens overnight,” she said.
Another grievous failing at several medical facilities across the country is the dearth functional conveniences including ceiling fans and air-conditioners. From the nurses’ rooms to the patients’ wards, many public health centres lack such facilities.
Consequently, patients blame nursing personnel for failings they have no control over; many patients are admitted into hospital wards with neither fan nor AC units. So doing, they are subjected to unbearable heat by hospital staff, who have to keep the windows locked to keep out armed robbers, rodents and mosquitoes.
Patients are also human hence it is understandable that they would complain. A recent investigation into the operations of one such teaching hospital revealed that surgical patients are admitted into poorly ventilated wards. Their experiences before and after surgery in the ward beggars urgent intervention; out of the six fans in a cubicle, for instance, just one was functioning and it was faulty as at press time. Due to the extreme discomfort experienced by one of the patients on admission, his relative had to start fanning him with a hand fan.
Many a patient have likened their stay in such facilities to sleeping in a tomb. Due to poor ventilation, nurses often advise patients coming in for surgery to bring fans from home if they hope for their temporary stay in the hospital to be conducive.
The toilets are very bad too. Most of them won’t flush; they are broken, discoloured and unusable.
Leave a Reply