Health, they say, is wealth. A nation without healthy people is good for nothing- a living dead. So also a nation without sound and qualitative healthcare policies will have its population peopled by weaklings and the sickly.
For a nation to progress, its first priority must be how to develop its human capita base. And the first means of achieving this is through provision of qualitative healthcare programs. Part of what worked for President Barrack Obama in the last United States’ election was his healthcare policy tagged Obamacare, which placed healthcare at the doorstep of the American populace.
The late sage, Chief Obafemi Awolowo, had the foresight and quickly put free qualitative healthcare in his four cardinal points agenda blueprint before he became the Premier of the defunct Western Region. When he came to the saddle of leadership, he pronounced what is today known as Awoism (Awolowo’s political philosophy) in a four-point program called Regime of Mental Magnitude.
For Awolowo, this was necessary because it complemented his free education programme. He knew at that time that only a healthy man could seek knowledge. Hence the aphorism: sound mind in sound body.
Nations with the highest life expectancy ratio, if properly examined, have as their prime, a priority of an all-encompassing healthcare policies backed by states-of-the-art facilities.
In Europe, a focal point for Africa in terms of solution to health conundrum, countries, who got their health care policies right, essentially enjoy some of the longest average life expectancies at birth – variously put at an average of 75 years in most countries. Here in Africa, the situation is diametrically contradictory. Death rate in Africa seems like 100 a penny. A 2005 figure puts it at 14.2 deaths per 1,000 people, which is considered the highest in the world.
Tragically, however, the countries of North Africa have significantly lower rates than those of sub-Saharan Africa according to the global health monitor, World Health Organisation (WHO). WHO further observed that infant and child mortality from medley of communicable and parasitic diseases are usually major death catalysts?
Vaccination campaigns have helped to lower death rates among children significantly since the last century. Nevertheless, over the same period, a swelling prevalence of infection with the killer Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) that causes acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS) has actually resulted in the decline of life expectancy in some countries.
The situation seven years after is not any better today. And this is due mostly to the sloppy manner with which health and health-related issues are handled in this part of the globe. Zeroing on Nigeria, the statistics signposts an unpleasant reality and bleak future, should the health situation be left unattended to. Our infant mortality rate is put at 94 in 1,000 live births and a life expectancy of 48 years.
Also, the global heath watchdog identified malaria as the leading cause of death and is likely to remain so, due to the growing resistance both of the malaria parasite to drugs as well as of the mosquito, which transmits malaria, to insecticides. Other preventable diseases that the country has been unable to halt include measles, whooping cough, polio, cerebrospinal meningitis (prevalent in the North), gastroenteritis, diarrhea, tuberculosis, bronchitis, waterborne infectious diseases such as schistosomiasis, and sexually transmitted infections.
Expectedly, the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) that causes acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS) is becoming more and more prevalent in the country with Federal Government paying leap service to controlling and subsequently eradicating it. For instance, statistics captured about 2.6 million Nigerians as having been infected with HIV and 170,000 lost to the deadly disease in 2005. This situation has nosedived at present.
This explains why today, Nigerians and other countries in Africa go to these technologically advanced countries of Europe, America, and lately Asia, for treatment of numerous ailments no matter how trivia.
Leaders of the country, while instilling confidence in the people to believe in what they have, junket around the world whenever they have slight ailment. They do not believe in the competency and proficiency of their own hospitals.
National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS) has remained, like any other white elephant project of the Federal Government, chiefly inoperative. Nigerians only get to hear it work in the number of advert placements on television and in the pages of newspapers.
On the contrary, the State of Osun under Ogbeni Rauf Aregbesola has decided to have a break with that coarse tradition of ineptitude, not only in the health sector of the state but also in other sectors such as education, agriculture, rural integration, economy, transportation, tourism, etcetera.
The focus here is the health sector and what the government has done and is doing differently. Therefore, part of this administration’s plans includes urgent need for the restoration of healthy living for the people of the state.
Following this resolve, government has focused on healthcare delivery including provision of effective and efficient healthcare delivery for all irrespective of age.
The Osun healthcare programme is planned in such a way that the people, whether living in rural or urban areas, would have direct access, to the provided health facilities effortlessly. Consequently, the government planned the location of those facilities in such a way that the citing of the main hospitals, referral hospitals and healthcare clinics to fall within reasonable radius to one another across the state.
A specimen: Primary Healthcare clinic within 10 (ten) kilometres radius of every Osun town with special attention to the needs of the children, women and elderly; a functional General Hospitals within twenty (20) kilometres radius of human habitation and Referral Hospitals within 30 (thirty) kilometres radius of human settlement.
All these are in addition to the establishment of free blood pressure checks in conjunction with private organisations at every local government office, 30 in all. Besides, there is also provision for free treatment of malaria for children below the age of 18 as well as senior citizens in the state.
Even with all these in less than two years, Ogbeni believes the health sector has not been uplifted to his set optimum standard. Thus, he has shifted his attention now to upgrading existing health infrastructure. Oddly, this has not been done in the history of the state since its creation twenty years ago. Medical personnel too are being sent on retraining programmes.
The idea behind this retraining is for the medical personnel to be exposed to latest medical technologies and techniques in various fields of medical practices. Hence, the State of Osun Government has committed N18 million for sponsorship of six medical personnel to the University of Magdeburg Teaching Hospital, Germany.
This first phase drew professionals from Ladoke Akintola University of Technology Teaching Hospital (LAUTECH). Soon, the second phase will follow. This is a manifestation of Aregbesola’s strong conviction and well-founded resolve to give people of the state qualitative, affordable and integrated healthcare facilities.
As Federal Government defers its millennium healthcare goal, the State of Osun believes ‘the time is now’ to achieve the MDG standard healthcare for its people. This administration does not believe in a dream deferred.
• Kunle Owolabi is of the Bureau of Communications and Strategy, office of the Governor of the State of Osun.
