DOCTORS’ DEMANDS

Whatever sigh of relief we heave at the news of the suspension of the strike embarked upon by the Nigeria Medical Association (MNA) is bound to be ephemeral. It is heart-warming that our doctors in the public health sector have, out of the Ebola emergency, decided to put a human face to their agitation. They have reasoned, but should we celebrate? This is an association whose members render essential services impossible to quantify; they are life savers whose plights should not be ignored.

But here we are in a country where government’s response to doctors’ grievances is mass sack. Between being a bad joke and an uninformed propaganda, the federal government announced the sack of these same doctors. 16,000+ medical doctors in the public sector, already grossly inadequate for a population of over 170 million people, were pronounced sacked in a democracy? It had to be a joke. And throughout the duration of the strike, government maintained a hard-line position. The general public was misinformed in a bid to portray the striking doctors as selfish, arrogant and implacable. Their demands were treated as if they were all about better wages and entitlements.

I took time to study the 24-point demands of the NMA and what I found could be classified into two groups. The first group of demands falls in the category of outstanding agreements officially reached by the government with the doctors during previous negotiations. As usual, those agreements are yet to be honoured. It is not so difficult to find instances where government enters into an agreement with a trade union and adamantly refuses to redeem its pledge; it is the same with ASUU, ASUP, NUT, NLC, etc.

The other category of demands made by the NMA concerns rational technical issues the government should be ashamed of refusing in the first place. For instance, the association demands the Office of the Surgeon-General, a professional among its members who should be saddled with the responsibility of medical bureaucracy. It wants the chairmen, Medical Advisory Committees in teaching hospitals and federal medical centres to be assisted by deputies. They demand the establishment of a health trust to upgrade public hospitals. The doctors want the position of Chief Medical Director/Medical Director to be occupied by a medical doctor as against using it to return political favours. Most importantly, they demand that government expedites the passage of the National Health Bill (NHB) and extend Universal Health Coverage to 100 percent from its current 30 percent.

How on earth are these self-centred claims?                     

We shouldn’t forget that our public hospitals are poorly stocked. There are cases where patients are made to pay for gloves and syringes. I have personally witnessed where a patient had to pay for the sanitary materials used during the evacuation of her miscarried foetus.  Aren’t these basics that should be available in every hospital? Why should any well-meaning government shirk the implementation of minimum standards in its health sector? We forget that resident doctors are also human beings who have families and responsibilities. If we don’t take care of them, then we should stop bemoaning brain drain, because it is going to continue on an unprecedented scale.

No doctor wants to work in public hospitals where there are not facilities. They either set up their own private practice or move in their droves to countries where things are done right. A    substantial percentage of members of the Association of Black Doctors in America are Nigerians. By implication, brain drain is one of the challenges faced by our health sector, occasioned by collapsed infrastructure, poor remuneration and a deficient healthcare master plan. All the doctors are asking is for government to tackle the problems in the health sector that have made Nigeria a medical scavenger.

Hon Abike Dabiri-Erewa said, at an interactive session with officials of the Nigerian High Commission in India, in 2011, that she was stunned by the revelation that Indian middlemen collaborate with fraudulent Nigerians to extort innocent Nigerians in search of medical treatments in Indian. Victims pay as much as three times the actual medical costs, no thanks to the scandalous opportunity a breakdown in our health sector has presented callous syndicates. Does this worry our leaders?

Isn’t it distressing that Nigerians seek medical attention in such odd places as Ghana, Egypt, the UAE and India, because our system cannot take care of itself? Those who cannot afford such “luxury” are faced with the choice of exorbitant private hospitals and their near-inefficient public counterparts at home. Yet, it is the constitutional right of every Nigerian to be catered for by the government, or what do we think is meant in Section 14 (2b) of the 1999 Constitution (as amended) by  “...the security and welfare of the people shall be the primary purpose of government”?