By Adekunle Adekoya

IT is clearly a trite observation that these are not the best oftimes for Nigeria and the Nigerian. So many negative things are happening at the same time that our people now desperately look for just one silver lining, that glimmer of hope, just that one promise of better things to hang onto, simply because the horizon looks so bleak and foreboding, at least in the foreseeable future.

Perhaps that’s why “happy” greetings have suddenly become the norm, away from the occasional greeting it used to be during special anniversaries, festive occasions, weddings, birthdays and the like. So from Happy New Year we moved to Happy New Month, Happy Weekend and Happy Sunday. Today is Friday, and the day has its own greeting — TGIF (Thank God It’s Friday)! 

This unending search for what to celebrate is actually what life is all about — the pursuit of happiness. However, the pursuit of happiness is a co-operative effort, a systemic machine in which every bolt, nut, winch, cylinder, etc., are all working together to achieve that aim.

When one of them is not, like when a bolt gets worn, the entire system gets affected. In a mechanical contraption, like a motor vehicle, the malfunction starts with, perhaps a screech, a whine, a grating noise or some other friction whose report indicates something is amiss.

To avoid discomfort that can threaten the prevailing thread of happiness, a mechanic is called, the fault located, and normalcy gets restored. That is what we all do, at the individual level. That is also how our country, as a social collective, is also expected to function so that individuals can continue the pursuit of happiness to the greater benefit of society.

That, I suppose, is one of the reasons governments exist, put in place by societies under a mutually-agreed covenant, or, if you like, a set of laws by which all are bound. In return, governments provide certain basic services, chief of which is the provision of security, without which the pursuit of happiness becomes gravely impaired.

One of the threats to the pursuit of happiness in our country now resides in the health sector. For the fourth time since the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak last year, doctors have gone on strike. Now, in the thick of the pandemic’s third wave and a cholera resurgence, they are still on strike, and government seems stymied.

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Where concessions were made, bureaucracy takes over as the next bottleneck, and one can only hope that fresh bottlenecks will not arise as both doctors and government spar. Meanwhile, our people are dying daily, needlessly, from lack of prompt attention, poor diagnoses, and self-medication with anguish and distress as the lot of families and loved ones.

A common refrain, particularly in the social media after exchanges about the health sector situation, is: “Who did this to us?”

An apt question, considering that the two federal ministers in charge of Health are both medical doctors — Dr. Osagie Ehanire and Dr. Olorunnimbe Mamora. Add another medical doctor, Dr. Chris Ngige, Minister of Labour and Productivity and all kinds of questions just begin to swirl around in your head. These are doctors, they are Nigerians, and before they got to their high horses today, they must have started climbing from somewhere.

Incumbent Health Minister, Ehanire worked at the University of Benin Teaching Hospital, and also served on the Medical Review Board of Edo State Hospital Management Board.

The Minister of State, Mamora is a doctor trained at University of Ife, Ile-Ife , now OAU who had been a medical director of many years standing before joining politics.

Labour Minister Ngige is a University of Nigeria, Nsukka-trained doctor who joined the civil service, rose to the level of deputy director in the Federal Ministry of Health and has also worked at the State House Clinic. With their backgrounds, surely they know the system, and how it works? Of the three, Ngige, in my reckoning understands the federal mindset more, being a former civil servant.

Added to that, these men have been in politics for some time and should be able to forge the wherewithal to resolve issues with the doctors, the bureaucracy and secure the necessary political blessing, if any, to smoothen things. Aren’t they worried people are dying? Are they happy with the state of things in their sector, in the middle of a global pandemic, worsened by outbreaks of diseases we thought we’d heard the last of, like cholera?

Are they happy at the sight of that long queue of doctors outside a foreign embassy in Abuja, recruiting doctors badly needed at home for hospitals in their country? An acquaintance in the health sector tells me that as at 2018, there were 72,000 doctors registered to practise in the country. Of these, the person said, more than 37,000 are working in foreign countries. And more are feverishly working towards their exit.

The truth is that many things in the health sector are looking south, and it is the responsibility of medical doctors in government to ensure that the southern direction is reversed; things must start looking up! As our people say, Naija go survive, ogogoro no dey sour. TGIF — Thank God it’s Friday!

Vanguard News Nigeria