•The president should act on our poor health and arrest medical tourism
Once again, President Goodluck Jonathan has lamented over a national challenge that is within his power to correct. Indeed, such lamentation is becoming his trademark. A few weeks ago, he had lamented that politicians were not delivering people-oriented dividends to the electorate. As if his programmes are people-oriented! The lamentation, this time, has to do with medical tourism that he said Nigeria has the highest number of people travelling out for in Africa.
Speaking at a presidential summit on Universal Health Coverage in Abuja, President Jonathan said we have suffered substantial capital flight to this development and that this is unjustifiable. “We still have the largest number of people in Africa and the developed world, travelling out of the country to seek health services. The scale of capital flight lost to medical tourism is enormous, not justifiable, and needs to be speedily addressed for the survival and development of our local health practitioners and industry,” he said at the event, at which he was represented by Vice President Namadi Sambo.
The issue is about primary healthcare which has virtually collapsed in the country. Quite characteristically, the president deluded himself by saying that we have made progress on the matter even though we are not where we should be yet. Unless the progress he was talking about was that made years ago, particularly under Prof Olikoye Ransome-Kuti as health minister. Primary healthcare, like most facets of our life, collapsed long ago and the evidence is the preference for foreign medical attention by Nigeria’s elite who can afford it. They do not have confidence in our medical personnel to handle even basic ailments, from toothache to headache, not to talk of more serious medical conditions.
Many of our public officials, including governors – Sullivan Chime of Enugu State and Danbaba Suntai of Taraba State – have had cause to travel out for medical treatment in recent past. The president’s wife is not exempted. This is nothing but a vote of no confidence in our medical facilities. But its solution is not beyond President Jonathan. What we expect him to do therefore, is to study the situation with a view to finding lasting solutions to it. What it calls for is action, not lamentation.
Healthcare began to deteriorate in the 1980s when our medical experts and other medical personnel left the country in droves in search of the proverbial greener pasture abroad. That was when our hospitals were no better than glorified consulting rooms. Two reasons accounted for this exodus: one was lack of tools for the doctors to work and second, we could not match the mouthwatering offers being made to them abroad, including countries like Saudi Arabia. Since there was no job satisfaction, it was only a matter of time for us to lose many of our consultants in the health sector to the countries where their services were better appreciated.
If therefore President Jonathan is sufficiently worried about the resources we are losing to these other countries as result of what is now referred to as medical tourism, he should do something about the appalling condition of our hospitals and give primary healthcare the attention it deserves. It is not enough to mouth transformation; it should be like a wind that cannot but be noticed whenever it blows. Our hospitals need to be upgraded, with state-of-the-art facilities provided; we should motivate our doctors and other workers in the health sector not only to retain those still in the country but also to make those who have left start to feel nostalgic.
From available statistics, many of our doctors out there are doing quite fine, which shows that the problem is not with them but with the environment. It lies within President Jonathan’s power to make that environment attractive. This is far better than merely lamenting the situation.
