S.O.S ALIEME

Do you know death is irreversible? In the past few weeks, we have watched Nigerians die like chicken.  The cause of their deaths could have been averted if the system has worked or is working. Those who are victims became victims not because their cases were very impossible but because help was unavailable, dismissed, delayed or misused.  May Nigeria never happen to you!!! That is what we all say until it happens to us or to our fellow brothers and sisters. 

Do you know that in this country whether you are rich or poor, we are one second away from death with one careless mistake? Ifunanya Nwangene lost her life to a snake bite because help was not forth coming.  She took herself to the hospital but they didn’t have anti-venom. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie recently lost her son but she fought for her son’s life but the system failed her woefully. But here we are.

Also, recently a child was given an injection that paralysed her and made her go blind. That could have been avoided if attended to properly. I also read about a man that was hit by a car and was carried to about five different hospitals and none of them could provide effective treatment. But all this while he was still alive and bleeding and watch Nigeria fails him. The person helping him end up dropping the man where he was hit because he has done his best. Where are we heading to?

As an advocate and a concern citizen, it is disappointing and unimaginable to be in a community where a system consistently ignores pain that the masses are going through. When a system keeps ignoring its citizens, which is called bullying; when a system fails the vulnerable repeatedly, that is violence. This is not about one doctor or hospital.  This is about a health care system that is under-equipped, under-funded, under-accountable and dangerously indifferent.

This only happens when the people you put in power do not make the right move towards the health sector. This is institutional gas lighting, neglect and dehumanization, the government has to do better.  Hospitals must be properly equipped, emergency cases must be mandatorily attended to. Human lives have to come before paper work, protocol or profit for the love of God and the country. These are preventable losses that can be normalized and when we keep silent it can be taken that everything is okay.

Silence is complicity, fighting bullying means fighting every single system that teaches people that lives are disposable and fighting everything that is contributory to the preventable losses and deaths.  We are saying it because we can say it, what about people who cannot say it?  In this country, people die every day because of negligence and the government seems to be silent about everything.  With little headache, government officials are out of the country to get proper medication and treatment; all with the tax payers money that they continue and consistently neglect.

These are actually people that we know and hear of that has a platform to speak of.  What about people that have nothing and cannot be heard.  They are dying in silence. It has happened to high profile people in the society. What about people who do not have a voice because death can never be undone? It is irreversible.  It is not something that we say after fixing the problem then we can console the families affected, who are also victims in Nigeria.

Access to quality and equitable health care has been a difficult challenge across many parts of Nigeria. This challenge becomes more pronounced when basic health care services cannot be accessed, particularly in areas where a significant population of the poor and vulnerable reside.

In situations where health care is available, affordability becomes the challenge due to the out-of-pocket payment required to access the services. There are many recognized health care facilities in Nigeria, however, most care provided at these facilities is of suboptimal quality due to limited hours of operation, poor staffing, and lack of sufficient infrastructure and equipment.

In addition, there are several government health care facilities built, but ill-equipped across the country and are subsequently abandoned and never made operational for service delivery, despite being the only health care infrastructure available in some communities. Thus, most of the people in these communities rely on unregulated drug stores and facilities and traditional healers, despite having built and ill-equipped health care facilities. Healthcare in Nigeria is a concurrent responsibility of the three tiers of government. Private providers of healthcare have a visible role to play in healthcare delivery. The use of traditional medicine and complementary and alternative medicine have increased significantly over the past few years.  Healthcare delivery in Nigeria has experienced progressive deterioration as a result of under-investment by successive governments, to effectively solve several problems that have existed in the sector over many years.

This directly impacts on the productivity of citizens and Nigeria’s economic growth by extension. The implication of this is that government expenditure for health is nothing to write home about out of all the money spent on other sectors of the economy across the nation. Low wages and poor workplace culture have forced hundreds of thousands of health personnel to flee to Europe and America. 

However, considering its size and population, there are fewer health workers per unit population than are required to provide effective health services to the entire nation. The most common reason is the brain-drain of health professionals in Nigeria, especially to Europe and America. Nigeria’s health department operates within a multi-tiered structure designed to provide medical services at various levels. The healthcare system is broadly categorized into primary, secondary, and tertiary levels, each serving distinct functions within the country’s health sector. I am lending my voice because bullying actually thrives in places where accountability is absent and in Nigeria most people and most systems do not take accountability.  Nigerians deserve better and we are in Nigeria.  We need to actually fix our country.  Bullying does not always come with insults but with silence and sometimes it sits in meeting where the fate of Nigerians are decided. I speak up because silence has become too expensive.  Too many lives are paying the price.  This is about dignity, this is about humanity and this is about accountability and it has to change.

God Bless Nigeria!!!