Citizen Emeka and the new Medical and Dental Practice Bill

Trying times, they say reveal those genuinely on the side of the poor. If you are among those that classify our overpaid and underperforming lawmakers as indolent, please buy a carbolic soap and proceed to wash your mouth with it. Even in their 11th hour, the chaps at the House of Representatives want to be […]

Trying times, they say reveal those genuinely on the side of the poor. If you are among those that classify our overpaid and underperforming lawmakers as indolent, please buy a carbolic soap and proceed to wash your mouth with it. Even in their 11th hour, the chaps at the House of Representatives want to be counted on the side of national interest.

Close to it being prorogued, the House has introduced an ingenious bill aimed at grounding medical and dental practitioners from leaving to ply their trade abroad. In case you are waiting for a commissioning date for new or second-hand X-ray machines, MRI and CT scanners for our hospitals, these guys are happy to disappoint you. Our reps have a better idea. Strike that, they think they found the silver bullet to fix Nigeria’s protracted medical crisis.

Graduate medical and dental practice graduates would now be compelled to serve the nation for five years before they could qualify for foreign practice. This revelation came as Britain registered another batch of 296 Nigerian trained health care professionals.

In the heat of the COVID-19 crisis, President Buhari grounded a plane reportedly sent to transport any willing Nigerian health care professionals to England. Buhari who lives by the professional competence of a London doctor wants to block the same access to others. Very smart move.

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The wicked might see this as a jail sentence for parents that have invested life savings on their wards’ training as medical and dental practitioners. They hope to reap from their investment and Nigeria does not provide the avenue for such reward.

This House of Reps brainwave has passed its second reading. Its accelerated hearing could see it rubberstamped before you have finished reading this piece. The reps might see a public hearing on such a sensitive bill tantamount to setting their own tail on fire to sniff its odour.

This is the best bill to be presented to the Green Chamber apart from the annual Appropriation Bills that enjoy their generous padding. Of course this bill takes no deep thought to the state of medical institutions or the hospitals that train these health care professionals. Not long ago, a Nigerian nurse was jailed for pleading the blood of Jesus on a dying patient. The poor lady was merely practicing what she had seen done in Nigerian settings.

Our hardworking reps are unlikely to know the harrowing plight of citizen Obinna Emeka. At 27, Emeka trained as a pharmacist after writing his first book. He was undergoing the mandatory one year National Youth Service Corps when he lost his life last week in Abuja right at the Abuja General Hospital and in the presence of doctors.

According to Emeka’s father, the pharmacist was knocked down by a vehicle around 7.10pm on the day in question. He was rushed to the Kubwa General Hospital where there was no doctor on duty. He was then moved to the General Hospital, ostensibly in a private vehicle since functional ambulances are hardly an item in Nigeria’s hospital settings. There, the available doctors recommended a full body scan and an x-ray conscious that there was no such capacity within their facility.

Emeka’s friends drove him to a private hospital for the mandatory procedures and returned with the results without as much as a first aid treatment to a wounded citizen. His father recalled that the ensuing ‘documentation’ took close to two hours by which time Emeka’s veins had collapsed. They watched helplessly as life ebbed out of the young pharmacist, another victim of Nigeria’s collapsed medicare.

Contrary to the current blame game, Emeka did not die because he was Ibo. He becomes a metaphor for how Nigeria negligently murders its promising citizens. Chinelo Nwando Megafu, a dental surgeon died from wounds sustained in the Kaduna train attack days before she was billed to travel out to practice. On February 17 this year, a pregnant Shema’u Sani Labaran died at the Abdullahi Wase Specialist Hospital in Kano. She was a victim of Buhari’s misanthropic change of currency politics.

Shemau’s husband, Malam Bello Fancy watched his pregnant wife die because the doctors at the specialist hospital insisted on receiving confirmatory text of bank transfer before attending to their patient. Malam Fancy had enough cash to cover the bill, but they were in a currency delegitimised by Buhari’s half-baked policy. To compound his fate, the GPS networks failed.

Fancy lost his wife and the baby due to negligence. It’s a case that should teach our dynamically inactive representatives not to prescribe paracetamol as cure for gangrene. Ibrahim Abdullahi, the Kano hospital spokesman, promised an investigation into the matter. We are yet to hear the outcome of that forensic inquest. Its ultimate findings would not bring back Shemau or her lost baby.

Back in Abuja, Emeka’s father, Eze Ogbonna, a traditional titleholder, has called for the closure of the National Hospital, Abuja. Obviously, this shell of a hospital won’t help a grounded doctor or nurse.

If Chief Ogbonna or Malam Fancy had the command of one of Buhari’s 11 presidential jets repurposed as an emergency air ambulance and equipped to carry out emergency surgery aligned to global best practice; Chinelo, Shemau and Emeka would still be here with us. Our president and his dynamically inactive legislature have spent eight years in office without a thought about equipping a single functional hospital anywhere in Nigeria.

They have not visited any medical training facility to find out what is needed to meet global or even regional health standards. If they had, they would have thrown this bill into the delete folder because it is repugnant to the natural rights of any expert to go where they could find professional fulfillment.

Apparently, the House wants to punish Britain for draining Nigeria’s medical manpower. This is a wrong way to go about it under a democracy. Nigeria is not Cuba, education; including medical education is not free here. Parents bear the bulk of its cost, not government.

These parents expect much more than the House is offering them. They do not deserve to be punished in their old age by a state that would definitely owe them their entitlements. Unless and until politicians build a comfortable place for citizens to live, work and thrive, any attempt to bench them would be a legislative sentence. Professionalism thrives only in an environment devoid of stress, fear and intimidation. Where people cannot fulfill destiny, relocation is a natural right.

What Nigeria urgently needs is a bill to prevent anyone paid from public purse from seeking medical treatment abroad. If these bourgeois elements have no alternative, they would be forced to building, equipping and maintaining functional facilities at home. They would pay attention to standardised medical and dental training. They would devote to outfitting medical centres to provide excellent care.

After all, neither the British Prime minister nor the King of England goes outside Britain for treatment. Why then should Buhari and soon Tinubu not be bound by this same rule? Why punish parents and house officers for their choice of profession? Why attempt to punish these professionals for your own lassitude?