How NMA Can Secure Trillions From The Nigerian Governments

We started the month of July with yet another ‘general’ strike by medical doctors under the auspices of the Nigeria Medical Association (NMA). They have ‘indefinitely’ withdrawn their services from public hospitals until their demands are met. On television I saw the NMA president mouth such words as ‘instruct’ in referring to the media, government and the general populace. I listened for the charter of demands and wasn’t struck by any of the items chosen to headline the 29 or so items despite being a long-term defender of the rights of medical personnel to comfortable and rewarding terms of employment similar to what is obtainable by their counterparts globally. I have been struck in the last few decades by the naija anomaly that renders doctors and allied professionals near beggars in a nation that confers comforts and luxuries on accountants, bankers, engineers, oil workers and of course politicians. I have engaged with doctors at almost every opportunity on the need for them to present their case in a way that will leave the government with little choice aside from bridging the yawning remuneration.

Beyond the peanuts we pay medical personnel in Nigeria is the issue of highly insalubrious and ill equipped facilities we expect them to practice their craft in. Even if all we expect them to do is split logs we should be able to provide better facilities than we currently see in our general and Teaching hospitals nationwide. We all have had the misfortune of spending time in public hospitals in recent decades either as patients or visitors and few of us have come away from those soul deadening encounters quite the same. At the oldest hospitals we find grand structures that were built by our forebears with the funds from cocoa, groundnuts and palm oil in the 50s and 60s which we have been unable to maintain with the trillions we now make from oil and gas. It is so obvious that the problem is not the lack of funds but what we have chosen to do with the sea of cash sloshing about in public coffers. The little we do not steal is spent on office holders and top civil servants and, in our scale of values, a professor of medicine deserves to be less remunerated than a possibly illiterate councilor!

This state of affairs has been lamented over the years with multiple strikes victimizing millions of citizens achieving next to nil improvement. Today I find myself counseling young ones NOT to study medicine no matter the passion or aptitude displayed. When asked the reason for my curious advice, I make them understand that you cannot practice medicine in naija without having the blood of countless innocents on your hands. You did not steal the money meant for drugs, equipment, the power sector or anything else but you are the (wo)man on ground that superintends the dispatching of the taxpayer to the great beyond in the pretend hospitals we call ‘centres of excellence’. That must do violence to a (wo)man’s soul and even the very best of us must be much diminished spiritually and emotionally after years spent in the abattoirs we claim to heal in. How in good conscience can one watch or encourage any young person to step into such a stream filled with ghouls and the spirits of those killed before their time? I offer but one caveat: study medicine if you intend to only practice outside Nigeria. In that case you will save many lives, will be among the best paid persons in your society and will be well regarded by all. At the end of June the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) released a list of 820 professions http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/06/the-best-and-worst-paid-jobs-in-americain-1-ludicrously-long-chart/373192/ that showed that medical professionals dominated the top echel on so I would counsel any aspiring doctors reading this to ‘Go west, young (wo)man’.
170 million Nigerian patients cannot go west however so we must find a lasting and bloodless solution to this enervating problem. Those lucky or just crooked enough to have sufficient funds do their healing and dying in India and various other points of the globe with even sprains and split nails being treated in Germany. For the sake of the 99% who can but dream of such solutions I have an idea to sell to the NMA.

We have all shouted ourselves hoarse since the 1980s to our masters to no effect. You, the NMA, have even sacrificed collaterally a few thousand lives in an attempt to move the immovable but those lives have been sacrificed in vain as the need for your current strike proves. To avoid being diagnosed as insane using Albert Einstein’s famous paradigm (Insanity = doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results), I ask you to consider thinking outside the box by rousing the voices from the rest of the world. We all know that our masters have the foreign gods that they worship. We know that even the oga patapata dare not respond cavalierly to a query from CNN’s Christine Amanpour much less ignore Michelle Obama or Hilary Clinton’s views. We know he won’t wait to hear from Cameron or Obama before doing the needful in any situation. With that fact established all we need do is bring to the notice of such foreign worthies the plight Nigerians in general and doctors in particular have labored under in the last three decades. How do we go about this?

I suggest we get out those cameras and camera phones we all own. Thank God that even doctors are paid enough to own smart phones. The NMA should set up public information teams in each public referral hospital. These teams should be given the mandate to go round the facilities of their hospitals: the wards, surgical theaters, toilets, kitchens, offices etc. They should create video documentaries of the physical and other rot that we all see and lament. The national NMA executive should employ a public relations firm, just the way our oga at the top has hired one for $1.2m to launder his image, and pass the raw footage to it for creation of an NMA Youtube channel showcasing how our masters kill us.

The NMA should also create a table similar to that published by the US BLS showing the relative wages of various jobs in Nigeria. I know I used to pay my driver more than a fresh doctor and Dangote probably pays his trailer drivers more than even medical professors earn. Particular attention should be paid to what political office holders, bankers and oil sector workers are paid. This table should be advertised extensively online and in our newspapers. The NMA should create a searchable database of such data on its website.

Then the NMA should go for the killer blow: get in touch with CNN’s Sanjay Gupta and arrange with him for an hour’s documentary on Nigeria’s failed health system. With his interventionist mindset I bet he will jump at it and even Al Jazeera and BBC wouldn’t mind a piece of the action. After the first screening of the resulting documentaries on those channels and the millionth download of the horror mini clips posted on Youtube by the PR company, the NMA executives should stand by for calls from Aso Rock for urgent negotiations. Please and please, do not go there with silly demands like those very forgettable 29 items on your current COD. Go big like ASUU: secure the trillions you need to rebuild most of the infrastructure and procure modern kit. Insist on benchmarking salaries and allowances of medical personnel with political office holders, banks and oil sector workers. None of these others contribute as much to our national wellbeing as you lot do even with all the current constraints. Do not accept the lie that the money simply isn’t available. Ngozi tried that with ASUU but they stuck to their guns and she somewhere ‘magicked’ the money out of thin air when water don pass gari. The economy somehow manages to find trillions to waste on councilors etc. The economy hands out a trillion to the armed forces every year for losing the war to Boko Haram. The economy finds about $100,000 to pay to every fresh graduate that joins the International Oil Companies from the very first year even as trainees. The economy should go and find the trillions you need to fix the hospitals and make your employment gainful.

We are tired of burying our young and lightly afflicted. We are tired of watching you patriots destroy your souls, minds and bodies battling against impossible odds. We are tired of losing our brightest and best to foreign hospitals and less noble professions. We are tired of the vicarious moral and spiritual responsibility of being part of a society where so many lives are needlessly wasted. We are tired of your strikes that achieve little more than accelerate the death by medical treatment or lack thereof of our compatriots. We are tired of life expectancy that is barely half the number in Japan. We are tired of having to go abroad to die. We are tired of doing the same thing without hope of a different outcome and appearing insane to the rest of the world. Please step up your game. Bring your unionism into the 21st century. Stop giving our oppressors such an easy out. May God’s grace suffice for us all and may even more effective tactics than the ones I have outlined be brought into this battle for our very lives.