- Commissioning of N21bn State House Medical Centre is major plus for the Buhari government
In fulfillment of his promise to bequeath a befitting medical centre to take care of the country’s presidents, vice presidents and members of their immediate families before the end of his tenure on May 29, President Muhammadu Buhari on March 19 commissioned the State House Medical Centre. The 13-bed facility was constructed at a cost of N21bn by Julius Berger, following presidential approval of the site of the centre within the precincts of the Presidential Villa in Abuja in November 2021.
The Permanent Secretary, State House Administration, Tijhani Umar, and director of maintenance, Joshua Apagu, had earlier led the Secretary to the Government of the Federation, Boss Mustapha, Minister of Finance, Budget and National Planning, Zainab Ahmed, and Minister of State for Budget and National Planning, Clement Agba, on final inspection of the facility. Mustapha had said after the inspection that “it’s a great sense of fulfillment that I am seeing within the period of two years this edifice standing today…So, this is money well spent and it will be for the good and betterment of our country.” Ahmed on her part volunteered to make herself available as guinea- pig in the 5-star medical centre should the need arise. “I have donated myself as one of the people that can be tried in this facility”, she said, adding “On test runs, I’m willing to come and do a medical here to testify that anything you can see here is what you can see anywhere you go in the world.”
Senate President Ahmed Lawan, the president’s chief of staff, Prof. Ibrahim Gambari, as well as Tijjani were among the dignitaries that witnessed the commissioning.
We commend President Buhari for bringing this 20-year dream into fruition. The essence of the centre is to address the frequency of the country’s presidents travelling abroad for medical treatment. “It would to a large extent deal with it. This is a clinic, I believe that all procedures can be conducted here, if need be through modern sciences. Telemedicine now is very common; somebody can be sitting in his office in Germany or in the US directing diagnosis and prescriptions, and also even procedures on a patient in this place”, the SGF said after the inspection.
The other benefit is that visiting heads of state and heads of government who require emergency treatment can also be attended to in the centre before they are evacuated out of the country.
It is also believed that the country’s former leaders would all have access to the facility.
Considering its significance in terms of the safety and privacy of the country’s first citizens’ medical history, and the propensity of our leaders for medical tourism with the attendant huge cost to the taxpayer, the centre ought to have been in place a long time ago. We doubt if there is any major country whose leaders are flown out at the slightest excuse of a medical challenge, no matter how trivial, as Nigeria. When Vice President Atiku Abubakar had a freak accident in which his leg was hurt in 2007, he was flown to London for treatment. Just knee injury! Meanwhile, the same Atiku had the temerity to criticise President Buhari for sending a visually impaired youth corps member abroad for treatment in 2018. His argument was that if the president had addressed the deplorable state of our hospitals, the corps member would have been treated here at home. This was a young man who was contributing in his own little way to national development. The 28-year-old corps member, Okenala Ahmed, was teaching Economics at Government Day Senior Secondary Schoool, Daura, Katsina State.
Atiku probably forgot while throwing stone that he had also served as vice president for eight years. What impact did his own government make on healthcare in the country? If the former vice president had chosen another time to criticise President Buhari on the matter, perhaps he would have had a point. But not when a man in his prime needed help. After all, the president himself had travelled abroad many times for medical attention in his eight years in office. According to The Punch, President Buhari had travelled out of the country a record 225 days on medical tourism as at six months ago, since his first trip to the United Kingdom on February 5, 2016. That was barely eight months after he assumed office. He spent six days on that trip. Although we do not know how much the trips cost the taxpayer, the Buhari government had earmarked N33.3bn for the State House medical infrastructure within the period.
Given his scathing criticisms of the state of healthcare in the country in a coup speech in 1983, we would have thought President Buhari would leave our hospitals better than he met them. But no. Whereas he had said that our hospitals had become ‘mere consulting clinics’ back then, most of the consultants have since moved on to places with greener pastures. So, our hospitals today lack not only the sophisticated medical equipment, even the consultants too are no longer available.
Notwithstanding, it is salutary that the Buhari government saw the project through, even though not a few Nigerians are asking, why now, barely two weeks to the end of its eight-year tenure. This question becomes the more pertinent with the statement of the president’s wife, Aisha, to the effect that successive Nigerian leaders would no longer have any excuse to travel abroad for medical treatment. “No need for any leader to spend months and months abroad because of healthcare. This one is for the health and wellness of the first family. They only need to maybe fly in experts to help our people”, the First Lady said.
For us, however, it is better late than never.
We can only hope the incoming government would find the place worthy of patronage. This is the only way the huge investment in it would not be a waste. It would also help in saving the hard-earned foreign exchange that the country would have spent treating the very important personalities that the medical centre is meant to serve.
A statement by President Buhari’s senior special assistant, media and publicity, Garba Shehu, after the commissioning gave an insight into some of the state-of-the-art equipment in the medical centre. These included the Cardiac Catheterisation Laboratory (CathLab), Operating Rooms for both regular and specialised procedures, Intensive Care Unit (ICU), Specialised Infectious Disease Isolation Suites and Specialised Consultation Rooms. Of course, the incoming government should feel free to raise the standard further if it feels a compelling need to do that.
But the centre should not be allowed to go the way of the old State House Clinic which President Buhari’s wife said about six years ago lacked basic tools like functional X-ray machine and syringes. The in-coming government should make judicious use of the facility as President Buhari urged.