THERE are many ways in which government can make progress without necessarily spending humongous sums on consultants or other categories of contractors. Let us start with hospitals. In the typical Nigerian hospital, you can get to the Accident and Emergency, A & E, where you are asked to get a card from Records, which is probably some 20 metres from A & E. At Records you are asked to go and pay for the card at Accounts which is another 20 metres from A & E  in the opposite direction from Records. So you walk 40 metres from Records to Accounts and thus adding the initial 20 minutes you walked from A & E to Records you have thus far traversed 60 metres. You then walk another 60 metres to Records to get the card and then yet another 20 metres back to A & E. After having been attended to by the doctor, you take whatever prescription you are given to Pharmacy which may be up to 50 metres from A & E.

Thus far you have covered 170 metres but your forced exercise in spite of your health condition is far from over! The drugs are costed at the Pharmacy only for you to be asked to return to Accounts to pay and thus you return the other way 70 metres, pay and then turn back another 70 metres for the drugs. So far you have covered 310 metres in your condition! Wow!

This is obviously a problem of poor hospital architecture but also one of poor hospital management. How can it be really that difficult to design a hospital such that these important departments are within close proximity of one another for patients not to be forced to embark on potentially life threatening exercises in a hospital to which they have come to preserve their lives? And even if the architect was dumb, clueless and unimaginative enough to design a hospital in such manner as to pose a public health challenge, how come the medical authorities who run the place did not take the initiative to reconfigure their workplace?

It cannot really be that difficult for services to be optimally rendered simply by concerned stakeholders being proactive, imaginative and up and doing. So a Minister for Health who ensures that hospitals are configured or reconfigured in such manner as not to subject patients to avoidable ordeals while attending clinic, and indeed, goes further to institute a minimum standard of hospital design with inter-proximity of crucial departments in mind, would be considered a success while one that does not, is incontestably a failure.

How can any Inspector General of Police, any Minister of Police Affairs or of the Interior be considered a success story if he or she does not ensure that policemen are adequately trained in forensics, ballistics and all the other fields that matter in the modern world of crime fighting? Any Inspector General of Police, Minister of Police Affairs or of the Interior who cannot ensure that when a suspect is lawfully arrested, he is promptly fingerprinted, mug-shot, and otherwise properly entered into the database so we never have another case of trying to determining whether a particular person is an ex-convict or not, is a failure.

How can we have a Police Force of some three hundred thousand plus men and women yet we do not have a single crime lab and are stuck with a Force that does not keep records? It occurred to me that the money Tafa Balogun was convicted for embezzling would have built world class crime labs for our police across all six geo-political zones! It is not that the police is necessarily underfunded. Yes, the salaries of policemen and women remain unconscionably low but there is money there for such projects as forensics labs and the requisite training pertaining thereto. It just happens that rather than invest in these projects, the money is simply stolen by those who should take the Force into the modern age.

What does the Ministry of Labour really do other than negotiate with unions on why not to go on strike? How can such a shamefully narrow job description encompass the entire gamut of implementing our labour laws? Labour laws in Nigeria are mostly observed in the breach yet we keep having high profile minister after minister with workers in all sectors across the country suffering untold hardship and inhuman oppression at the hands of employers, both local and foreign. When last did it occur to the Ministry of Labour to insist to private employers to pay no less than the national minimum wage to the tens of millions of factory, household and sundry other workers toiling in the private sector? Besides our microscopic minority of civil servants in the workforce, does the Ministry of Labour even realise that its mandate extends to the vastly greater army of house-helps, gardeners, messengers, gatemen, drivers, fuel attendants, secretaries, and nannies, etc who toil daily propping up an economy from whose rewards they have been largely excluded?

How difficult can it really be for the Minister for Communications to make history by becoming the first of his kind to give us a dedicated emergency short-code with which we can all have access to the police, ambulance, fire and similar services? The present Minister has impressed me with his vision for a post bank to bring financial services to rural Nigeria. It is a most commendable idea but if he can just get us that emergency short-code, he would have immortalised his name!

*Mr. Jesutega Onokpasa, a lawyer, wrote from Sapele, Delta State.