Buhari goes to London for medical tourism
SIR: Mr. President Sir, Why are you not receiving medical treatments from your highly rated doctors in Nigeria? Are you jetting out because your citizens in the medical profession are embarking on indefinite strikes? Mr. President, this not a fibbing conversation. Your citizens are suffering amid plenty. People are dying from needless afflictions, and you’re talking about the Queen.
Sir, leadership is accountability and responsibility to the people. Your citizens, out of frustration, are allowed to go on self- exile for greener pastures. Mr. President, isn’t it a shame for a leader of the most potentially prosperous and wealthiest nation in Africa to be going on medical transportation to Queen Elizabeth’s land? Compare all the ramshackle private, public healthcare institutions and University Teaching Hospitals in Nigeria with other healthcare centres worldwide. You will realise that we are all in serious trouble as ordinary citizens in Nigeria. Take medical travel, leisure, and tours to other advanced countries; you will see many of your boisterous citizens as medical directors, professors of medicine, directors of, nursing facilities doctors, and other medical providers using state- of- the- art technology and facilities to do their jobs. I am sure most of your London medical providers in your care unit are Nigerians. Debunk my honest postulation if you like, Mr. President! It’s sadly and frustratingly true. Nigerians in the Diaspora are frustrated and dare not attempt to go back home. Why did your citizens who are medical personnel go on strikes in Nigeria? The reasons are not far- fetched, sir. Apart from their commonsense demands from your government, the basic infrastructural amenities are nonexistent in Nigeria. Roads are death traps; our local commercial flights are not airworthy. You want Nigerian professionals in the Diaspora to come back home? How their professional counterparts in Nigeria manage to practise their medical profession is beyond rational comprehension, sir! Nigeria’s citizens are in the long- haul suffering on a famished cloud in a journey to nowhere! Who will save Nigeria? We reposed our mandate in the hands of the old General Buhari. We fought for him; the skeptics wailed, the Buharists jabbed and pounded the wailers with writings. All our brawling silliness with one another and the social contract we signed with Mr. Integrity have come to null.
Mr. Integrity’s hyped integrity has now fizzled into the firmament of cursed Nigerian politics. We were warned by genuine wailers that the old General Buhari is weakened. The wailers were right, and “We the Buharists” were wrong. It took the real Buharists some time to notice the deliberate indifference and nepotism of a leader we signed a social contract with! The former wailers and the current wailing wailers ( we the Buharists) are now entangled in the same web of disappointment— an insignia of a contraption in a wasteland. “Who will save Nigeria?” This is another dark chapter in the Nigerian book of Lamentations.
Yahaya Balogun wrote from Arizona, USA.