Healthcare in Naija
In the late 90s, my friend’s younger sister had an appendectomy at a hospital in either Nsukka or Enugu, I forget which. At some point during the surgery, according to my friend, there was a power outage and the doctors wrapped up by flashlight. My friend’s sister survived and the story of her surgery by flashlight has become a dinner table anecdote. Some years ago, a woman I knew in Belgium returned to Nigeria to process the papers for her two children in Benin City to join her and her new husband in Europe. It was the beginning of summer. She had hoped to be done on time for the children to be in Belgium for the first day of school in September. On her last day in Nigeria, she was in a car accident and was heavily injured. By all accounts, she would not have died had she been given adequate treatment.
Since last week, #Justiceforpeju and #JusticeforOmolara have been trending. Mrs. Peju Ugboma and Omolara Omoyajowo are both, tragically, the latest victims of a healthcare system that has been in shambles for so long. It is impossible to imagine that there was ever a time when things were different. In Ugboma’s case, the private hospital in Lagos she was admitted to and where she apparently suffered internal bleeding after an elective surgery, did not have a CT scanner. In Omoyajowo’s case, the hospital in Ogun State where she had been a patient for two years did not even have her medical history and did not have an ambulance available when they wanted her moved to another facility because her condition was critical. They asked a friend to move her in a private car and to keep the windows down for air (because they could not send an oxygen concentrator with her).
Twitter users have been posting too of their own horrific experiences with hospitals in Nigeria, losing friends and families because hospitals did not have basic amenities one would expect a hospital to have: blood, power supply, oxygen tanks. Why are we even shocked when Buhari’s wife told us that Aso Rock clinic did not have an ordinary band-aid.
According to Global Citizen’s Akindele Okunola, “Nigeria’s health care system has gone from being comparable to the rest of the world in the 70s and early 80s, to one of the world’s most underfunded and least robust. According to 2018 figures from the World Bank, Nigeria’s public spending on healthcare is only 3.89 per cent of its $495 billion GDP. For Nigeria to reach the global average of 2.7 beds per one thousand people, there have to be an additional 386,000 beds and tens of billions of dollars of investment. That investment does not seem like one the government is prepared to make. Not while those in charge can travel abroad for their physicals and treatment. Why invest where they can’t benefit? In 1983, when the military