Plight of female doctors in Northern Nigeria
It wasn’t surprising but rather shocking when female medical doctors made it to the categories of unmarried in Kano state. This is according to a survey conducted by a renowned Islamic scholar, Sheik Aminu Ibrahim Daurawa. The fact that most female medical doctors struggle to find husbands isn’t exclusive to Kano state but a general trend all over the North. While fathers and sons fear they won’t be able to manoeuvre an educated and career lady as they please, mothers on the other hand are trapped in trepidation that their loyal sons will be truncated from their territorial reach.
Over time, girl-child education has gained acceptance in the North, with parent willingly sponsoring their daughter’s educations up to tertiary level. Courses such as Medicine & Surgery (MBBS), nursing, laboratory sciences, microbiology, etc. have recently become the choices of majority of young girls of the region. The demand by a very conservative part of this country to guard it mothers, daughters and wives from being attend to by male medical doctors, especially during child delivery ignited a campaign to have plethora of girls study medically related courses. This is evident in the rate of enrolments into these courses both at local and international universities. The number of young girls sponsored by Northern state governors to study MBBS abroad is enough an evidence to buttress the point raised. But the level of successes recorded so far in having more female medical doctors in the north seems to be under threat by the same society that demanded for it.
Most of our beliefs of who an ideal wife should be seem to be suffocating, if not scuttling the progress made so far. It’s sad and sickening how majority of us give lame excuses as to why we wouldn’t want to marry these ladies that sacrificed to study so hard for years in medical schools. We are so obsessed with wanting to see female medical doctors in every of our hospitals but have selfishly avoided and jettisoned our own way of contributing. Instead of devising ways to lessen their workloads when we espouse them, we rather prefer to complain about the night shifts, busy schedule, studies, attending to emergencies at odd hours, and attending to male patients as our excuses for abhorring them as prospective spouses. Instead of conceiving ideas and creating channels to assist them balance work and home front, we rather prefer to side line them as our probable wives to be. Instead of psychologically and emotionally supporting them, most of us choose to harbour a skewed belief that presumes only few of them are chase. Instead of us to accept them and help them live normal lives, we’ve decided to stigmatise, isolate, and make them look inferior to those ladies we go after.
Unless the north is willing to stop the double standard in its demand for female medical doctors and put societal needs over personal desires, the progress made so far will be lost. The moment young ladies planning to study MBBS get trapped in the dilemma of choosing between being accepted or being isolated in the society start opting for the former over the latter, the progress made so far will surely be lost. And in a situation where we men refuse to change our mentality and yet these ladies still choose to make the sacrifice, we may end up pushing them to harbour hatred towards the very society that entices and encouraged them to study for its greater benefit and in the end, isolate them.
Yahya Idris, Kaduna.