– Speaks on OHIS promising growth; unveiling plans of agency’s building by Adeleke

The Executive Secretary of Osun Health Insurance Scheme (OHIS), Dr. Niyi Oginni has recounted how Governor Ademola Adeleke prevented the collapse of social health insurance in the state by ensuring that the agency’s essential service rendered to the people wasn’t truncated by the politics of a change in government.

Gov. Adeleke had, on Dec. 31, 2022, approved the recommendation of a committee for the suspension of Oginni, however, upon further review he (Adeleke) recalled Oginni citing reports of imminent collapse of the state health insurance scheme and the need to normalise the operations of the agency.

Speaking on Adeleke’s intervention while reviewing the impact of OHIS on healthcare delivery in Osun during an interactive session with the media, Oginni completely agreed with the governor’s stance on his recall – he said, OHIS and the health sector to a great extent would have faced a lot of setbacks if disrupted by the politics of change of power at the said time.

His words: “Initially, when the government took over, they froze the accounts of all agencies in the state as expected. In my agency, as at the time the Adeleke government was coming on board, we had a retainable revenue reserve of over 1.3bn, though we started with zero kobo in 2018. “In a state that is resource poor like our state (Osun state), that attracts the interest of politicians and civil servants alike. Expectedly, there were several petitions and allegations that were made against me which the new government had to investigate. 

“One of such was that I was so loyal to the outgone administration of Governor Oyetola that I will sabotage the Government of Sen Ademola Adeleke if I am allowed to continue in office. That and many other allegations led to the recommendation of the committee for my suspension in their interim report. Nevertheless, I was allowed to continue in office to perform the critical operations of the scheme pending the submission of the final report. It was after the submission of the report that His Excellency, Sen. Ademola Adeleke reversed the suspension and gave approval for the agency’s full activities to continue in order to prevent a collapse of the institution.

“As at the time the government changed hands, the Agency’s headquarters building project was almost completed and we were hoping to commission it in December, 2022. In fact we had hoped that it will be the first project the new governor would be commissioning. Unfortunately, the suspension issue and prolonged freezing of the agency’s accounts prevented this dream from coming true. Nevertheless, by the grace of God, governor Adeleke will be commissioning it in the second or third week in August together with the access road leading to it which is also being rehabilitated by the Agency from its retainable revenue as approved in the 2023 budget”. 

On how the OHIS has fared, Oginni said, “We started with the formal sector and were to cover the civil service for a period of three months. We were able to cover the formal sector including the civil servants and public servants who had to come automatically on the scheme by the provisions of the OHIS law. Then, we had enrolled about 70 thousand of them, but now we have over 96 thousand in the formal sector, which consist of both the principal and their dependents.

That was our goal, so we met the goal of the enrollment of the formal sector and we didn’t have problems doing that unlike other states” he noted. Right now, we have over 265,000 enrollees from the formal sector, informal sector both self-paying and the vulnerable persons being paid for by government equity and the students of tertiary institutions under the Tertiary Institutions Social Health Insurance Programme (TISHIP)”.