: It’s About Time To Reinvent Medicare in Nigeria And Save The People From Preventable Trauma
The Oasis Reporters
May 14, 2025
The healthcare situation in Nigeria presently is in dire straits but this brief write-up will try to look at a small part of this gargantuan problem in the hope that some light would be beamed on the issue.
The situation at Nigeria’s first Teaching Hospital where the Saudi Arabian monarchy used to come for their medicals in the 60s, University College Hospital (UCH) Ibadan seemed like a panic in the first week of May 2025.
The Teaching Hospital had advertised vacancy positions for doctors and nurses and 134 candidates were said to have been selected after their application much earlier on.
Because of Nigeria’s legendary centralization and bureaucratic set-up, the relevant ministry in Abuja, the Federal Capital had slated the first week of May for the data capture of the successful candidates. Out of the 134 that were invited for capturing, only 20 showed up. Just 20. Where were the remaining 114?
The guess is that they’ve probably left the country to pick up appointments in foreign countries.
It got to the point where the bosses were asking nurses if they had friends who are nurses or doctors. No one wanted to remember tribalism again or wait for lobbying by the powerful. If anything, the old criteria of aptitude tests and interviews were set aside. Whoever was a doctor or nurse should just come for automatic employment first. Those to do the data capturing were already on standby.
UCH is desperately in need of medical personnel. That was the situation.
Patients come to UCH because they believe that they are coming to meet competent and experienced medical practitioners to treat their ailments. They have the money with which to pay their bills and they believe that the right equipment needed is possibly on ground. But what happens when they meet no caregivers ?
Nigeria needs to reinvent the best ways to keep and retain medical practitioners. It also needs to make it’s hospitals nor only attractive to citizens, but enticing enough to foreigners who should come in as medical tourists to spend their foreign currency here. It’s another way to build an economy.
Take Dental surgery for instance, this is a very expensive medical procedure all over Europe and in the Americas. It can cost the equivalent of over a hundred dollars or thereabouts for just scaling or polishing of the teeth and bookings to see a dental surgeon can take months on the waiting list. It’s not the same in Nigeria.
Turkey for instance realized this and set up first class dental surgery clinics in the country with fantastic hotels nearby to attract European and American tourists waiting to fix their bad and painful teeth, in quicker time. Turkey charges moderately with no long waiting time.
Many of the surgeons employed to do the work are not surprisingly Nigerians trained in institutions like College of Medicine and Dental surgery in Ibadan and other universities.
Why can’t the Nigerian nation reinvent the procedures for engagement and retain these talents at home while tourist hotels are encouraged to be built near medical facilities to attract foreign currency inflows that can boost the economy ?
We may not quickly realize it, there is a vicious and desperate struggle worldwide to attract medical professionals by wealthy countries and Nigeria is making it very easy for them to poach doctors and nurses as well as other medical professionals like laboratory scientists or technologists from Nigeria that spends millions in training them.
When these medical practitioners are attracted to Europe and the Americas as well as the Arab countries, our Nigerian leaders and other affluent members of the society go over there to spend mega dollars for treatment, catered to by Nigerian doctors and nurses who are resident abroad. It’s another form of silent wealth transfer because Nigeria has not upped it’s game in treating their medical professionals well.
When you look closely all over our hospitals, there’s hardly any doctor that doesn’t consult in two or three hospitals every day, just to have enough money to get by with because payments are poor and there is a scarcity of doctors despite churning out thousands of them from our teaching hospitals every year.
Where do the graduates run to ?
Abroad.
Why?
The conditions at home are not suitable.
So Europe or the Americas would offer better packages and go further to attract patients to their hospitals from other countries who come to spend dollars and Euros for simple procedures that are ironically performed by the same poached Nigerian staff working abroad, thereby making Nigeria poorer and more desperate medically.
Until Nigeria smells the coffee, and does the right thing, things will continue to get desperate.
Greg Abolo
gregabolo@gmail.com
