It is the tradition of American politicians running for president to write a book. In 1975, peanut farmer, former Governor of Georgia State and Democratic presidential candidate Jimmy Carter wrote an autobiography titled Why Not The Best? Carter soon fulfilled another American campaign obligation by publishing the audited accounts of his peanut farm. The auditors had found many gaps in the farm’s accounts, so Newsweek magazine did a story titled, “Why Not The Best Accounts?”
Jockeying and jostling has already begun in earnest by those who want to become President of Nigeria in 2023. All the print, online and electronic media should team up together with NGOs and demand that everyone who is aspiring to the position must write a book between now and next year. Why because, we do not want to be arguing anymore about what you promised or did not promise when you were running for the office. Let us have it in fine print, so that we will wave it in a leader’s face when he fails to live up to anything he promised.
Let us jump from books to real life. President Buhari’s departure for the UK last week, for what was billed as a “routine medical check-up,” at least suffered from bad timing. He left on the day the National Association of Resident Doctors embarked on strike to press home their demands for certain things. Personally, I frown at doctors embarking on strike for any but the most extreme reason. Any family that loses a loved one as a result of this strike will most likely blame the doctors, not the government, for the painful loss.
The coincidence of the president’s medical trip and the doctors’ strike made some people to unearth a lecture that Buhari delivered at Chatham House, UK in 2015. He made many startling pledges there, including that he will not travel to seek medical attention abroad. He was already the President-elect at the time so he was under no compulsion to make campaign promises, hence the belief that he really meant it.
If, since then, the Presidency found some good security, privacy, protocol or technical reasons why that promise could no longer be kept, it should have apologized to Nigerians and said so. The next question is, why did the government promise doctors some things and failed to deliver on the promises? Again, if there are good reasons why the promises could not be kept, it should level with the doctors and say so.
Doctors are not unreasonable people, for the most part. They are proud, overconfident and sometimes haughty. I once asked my Polish teacher Professor Robert Miodonski why Nigerian doctors are haughty. He said, “It is the same everywhere. It is part of their training.” I however realized with time that daily encounters with illness, demonstrable correlation between many illnesses and poverty, death and autopsies make doctors far more realistic about life than ASUU members, for instance. If government pledged to pay some allowances but does not have the money to pay, doctors could be convinced to wait a little longer. Only that government’s chief negotiator, Labour Minister Dr. Chris Ngige’s diplomatic skill is zero. He has threatened to apply the no work no pay rule on striking doctors, even though he did not apply it on others who went on strike earlier for much longer periods.
Which brings me to the next question: why is it that, even after the very traumatic COVID experience and world-wide lockdown, our rulers took absolutely no steps to transform this country’s health care environment? Enlightened self-interest alone should teach that rulers must make provisions for the day when even the richest and most powerful among us may not be able to go abroad for medical treatment.
Not all medical conditions would wait for you to buy an air ticket, get a visa and start going abroad. Think about a terrible car crash or being shot by a bandit. I once went on tour to the Trauma Centre of Allegheny General Hospital in Pittsburgh. The Chief Surgeon told me that they operate on the concept of “golden hour.” A trauma patient must be evacuated from the accident scene, sped to the hospital, be taken into the Trauma Centre which had 20 standby surgeons, and pass out of it into ICU, all within one hour of the accident! He said survival chances improve by 90% if the patient is treated within the golden hour.
Even if you have a private jet waiting for you at Nnamdi Azikiwe Airport, assuming you already have a ten-year multiple entry Schengen visa, if the accident occurred on a Nigerian highway or at your country house, you must still need nearly a day to evacuate to Europe. Your survival chances are infinitely brighter if there is a good hospital around here to treat you.
I am just wondering. The Buhari administration has been in power for nearly six years now. What concrete steps have been taken to drastically curb medical tourism abroad? The shortest way to do that is to build hospitals in Nigeria that can provide the same quality service. Given the technical, ethical and cultural deficit of our public sector, no one expects it to be able to build or, more seriously, maintain such hospitals. It can however get foreign investors to do so.
Government should approach some private hospital chains in Germany, Turkey, Egypt, India, UK or France with mouth-watering incentives. The biggest incentive is to show them the number of patients that Nigeria sends abroad every week and how much money they can make from it. They may still complain about our power supply and insecurity, but at least some of them will come. How does Julius Berger do it, deploying teams of engineers in the bush despite the bandit infestation? Incoming investors should consult JB for clues.
The only question, for which I have no ready answer, is that the coming of many quality foreign-owned hospitals in Nigeria might stem elite medical tourism abroad but could worsen the plight of public hospitals, as the coming of private schools did to public schools. Let someone else answer that question. Some people are heavily paid to answer questions. I am only paid to ask questions.
