THE AGONY OF DISTRESSED NIGERIANS

As devoted human rights campaigners, our official and private lines are usually inundated with calls from distressed members of the civil society. These callers ranged from house wives confronting different facets of brutal domestic abuses and violence to single girls and men who have wandered the major streets of townships and cities searching for the elusive white collar jobs, but can’t find any.

Sadly, the other frustrating type of calls comes from gravely distressed Nigerians who can’t find three square meals daily.

For 10 years we have administered our organisation as a platform that uses the media to highlight the daily challenges of human rights’ violations that occur daily affecting the ordinary citizens of Nigeria.

But I can confess that the last year and half is obviously the most pathetic in terms of degeneration of the economic wellbeing of Nigerians. Between December 31, 1983 to August 27, 1985 when the then Major General Muhammadu Buhari masterminded a military junta, Nigeria witnessed economic austerity measures that led to scarcity of essential commodities such as consumables to the extent that those items nearly became rationed just like what currently obtains in Venezuela.

Yours faithfully as a junior high school student remembers vividly joining the queues to be able to buy confectionery and household items whilst running errands for my parents. That was the memories of the first coming of Muhammadu Buhari as head of state.

His second coming since May 29, 2015 after an incumbent accepted defeat and handed him over the baton of political leadership, the national economy has gone from bad to worse precipitating one of the harshest meltdowns in the political annals of our nation.

Although it is a fact that since 1999 when the extant constitution came into being, the chapter two which emphasises the fundamental objective principles of state policies have never been implemented but never has the national economy reached the threshold it has been in the last one year. This is because on the average, our office receives a dozen communications on daily basis which specifically have to do with complaints from Nigerians that their family members are hungry and indeed economically depressed. Just before committing these thoughts into writing, a call from a family in Port Harcourt and basically the caller wanted to know how we can provide immediate bailout for the family to eat today. “Hello, is that the National Coordinator”, the caller asked from the other end and then added thus: “please send us money to eat. We are starving in my family”.

Immediately I ended the call with the person from Port Harcourt, another call emanated from Jos, Plateau Sate from a family that wants us to assist them to pay a hospital bill for one of the members who needs a medical emergency.

At other times, we have had to struggle to find responses to give some of these callers who are in need of urgent financial bailouts for urgent medical emergencies. The cases of persons not being able to meet the medical emergencies that confront them has to do with the non-existence of an effective national health insurance scheme unlike in most other climes whereby the right to medical insurance is what defines the essence of good governance.

In Nigeria, the NHIS is marred in internal administrative corruption and inefficiency. The Executive Secretary has just been suspended but he has denied all the allegations of wrongdoing.

This last point takes us to the issue of corruption and inefficiency in the system which has crippled the capacity of the health institutions to dispense health insurance.

Whereas over 165 million of Nigerians are too poor and economically weak to pay for private medical treatments, the public health sector is almost in a stage of comatose.

In some federating units, even the long-existed general hospitals have been sold out to private entrepreneurs at giveaway prices and the populace exposed to early deaths.

Imo State is one bad example when we talk about public health care because the current governor has reportedly auctioned away most of the functional health facilities to his alleged cronies, thereby letting the poor citizens to contend with looking for healthcare from the many quack health facilities that dot the state. Most states are not better off than the Imo State’s experience.

What makes all these experiences very terrifying is that President Muhammadu Buhari has been in and out of private hospitals in London, United Kingdom at public expense.

Only recently the Cable News Network pejoratively stated that Nigeria is the only country whereby the president has been to a foreign medical facility for over two months without returning to his nation. Apart from economic recession which is biting so severely since the current government came on board, the problem of unemployment has spiralled out of control even by official estimates. The National Bureau of Statistics recently issued a report showing how disturbing the unemployment issue has become. In a given month over a million employed persons are sacked because of the rapidly collapsing infrastructure in the country which had not created the enabling environment for the private sector to thrive and engage more hands. Emmanuel Onwubiko, Head of Human rights Writers Association of Nigeria