We Are Looking For The Doctors By Sunny Awhefeada

Brigadier Sani Abacha, as he then was, it was who announced the 31 December 1983 putsch that torpedoed the ill-fated government of Alhaji Shehu Usman Aliyu Shagari and sounded the death knell for the second republic. An unforgettable line in Abacha’s coup speech was that our hospitals had become “mere consulting clinics”. That criticism of our public health sector was a searing indictment of the failure of government in that sector. Although, the speech pointed to a negation of the purpose of government, we must realize or think that there were doctors to carry out consultations in those “mere consulting clinics” and for that we must give kudos to the government of that era. That government deserves approbation for being able to keep doctors in those “mere consulting clinics” because forty-two years later when things ought to have improved, the hospitals have degenerated beyond being “mere consulting clinics”, to becoming hospitals without doctors. Military regimes, when they were in vogue, prided themselves as corrective and messianic in vision and mission respectively. Sadly, the reality of their stay in power depicted them as rabid mercenaries whose allegiance to the state was unpretentiously doubtful. If Abacha cited our failed health system as a reason for military intervention then, it was expected that that problem would have been fixed with dispatch. But four years after that broadcast his co-conspirator and coup merchant, General Ibrahim Babangida, whom he assisted to power had to spend a long time in a Paris hospital on account of radiculopathy. Their buddy, General Muhammadu Buhari who twice ruled Nigeria and at whose behest Abacha made the “mere consulting clinics” speech also had to be treated in a foreign hospital for ear pain, an ailment that could have been treated free of charge in Orogun, Kokori or Evwreni.

The foregoing narrative reflects Nigeria’s predilection for backpedalling. Each preceding regime and each preceding year appears to be better than the one after it. This is the reason why the ills of 1983 had become bubonic in magnitude in 2025. If our hospitals were “mere consulting clinics” in 1983, they had become hospitals without doctors in 2025! Nigerians are buffeted and traumatized on all fronts. Each sector of our national life has failed and it is the citizens, the hoi polloi, who bear the brunt and dire consequences of the failure induced by bad leadership. This is more telling in the health and education sectors. The title of this piece owes its making to the desperation of three sisters whose ailing mother was left unattended to for four days in a government hospital in a state created over fifty years ago and which now prides itself with a number of flattering sobriquets. When their mother took ill, they had no money to take her to those glittering and magnificent private hospitals. So they took her to the government hospital hoping to get a doctor to attend to her. On arrival, they were told that the doctors do not come to work every day. Big and sprawling as the hospital was, it has only three doctors. The three sisters then hoped that the doctors would show up the next day and kept hopeful vigils. Then a nurse came at past noon to announce that she sighted two of the doctors just arriving. What followed was a stampede by relatives of patients who scrambled for the doctors’ attention.

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A visitor who came to check on a patient asked nobody in particular about the cause of the rowdiness and the three sisters answered “we are looking for the doctors”. Yes, this happened in Nigeria of 2025! Nigeria is being confronted by acute shortage of medical doctors. The health sector has been facing perennial brain drain in the last ten years for so many reasons chief among which is absolute lack of motivation arising poor remuneration and collapsed working environment. Health workers, like every other Nigerian worker, are poorly paid and the hospitals like every other workplace have all collapsed. Electricity which is cardinal to healthcare services is almost non-existent. The University College Hospital (UCH), Ibadan, once the pride of Nigeria and Africa in terms of tertiary health matters has been in darkness for only God knows how long. Last year, a video of patients protesting over lack of electricity and water made the rounds on the internet. Only some days ago medical students also protested over the reign of darkness for more than sixty days. If this could happen in UCH what would be the fate of other hospitals.

The number of medical doctors fleeing Nigeria daily cannot be correctly ascertained. Records show that one thousand, four hundred and seventeen doctors left Nigeria for the United Kingdom in 2023. Sixteen thousand medical doctors left Nigeria in five years. And some of them even left for Sudan, Togo and Sierra Leone of all places! There are just about fifty-five thousand doctors for Nigeria’s two hundred and twenty million people. The report also put the patient-doctor ratio in Nigeria at one doctor to nine thousand patients as against the World Health Organization’s (WHO) one doctor to six hundred patients. Only a few years ago, in 2018, Nigeria was classified among the most unsafe places in the world to give birth alongside Niger, Sudan and Somalia. Neonatal and infant mortality rates in Nigeria are high and frightening. Safe child delivery has become a miracle among the people because our hospitals have no doctors. Preventable deaths occur hourly in Nigeria and every neighborhood, distant and remote, lament and mourn.

A visit to many of our public hospitals is a journey into uncertainty and anxiety. The endless wait and unending queue to see the doctor that will not come is always enough to exacerbate the patients’ condition. The elderly and geriatric who have served Nigeria “with all their strength” are left to wallow in pain along hospital corridors from cockcrow till dusk. Many who have given up on the health system patronize pastors, prophets, healers, and fall back to herbs and other remedies in their quest for wellbeing. Many healing homes are springing up and different maternity centers run by quacks are experiencing boom in patronage because our hospitals have no doctors.

Yet, despite the dreary situation and apparent failure, our rulers mount the soapbox to tell us about huge investments in the health sector and how well it has been transformed. Not too long ago, Godswill Akpabio as Governor of Akwa-Ibom State boasted that he had built a world class hospital in Uyo and the people clapped for him. A few months after leaving office he had a minor accident, but the world class hospital that he claimed he built couldn’t treat him. He had to be treated abroad. President Bola Tinubu has also garlanded himself as the builder of the centre of excellence, but he undergoes medical attention in Europe. The hospitals he built in the center of excellence are not excellent enough to treat him. Did a former first lady not cry out some years ago that the Aso Rock clinic located in the very seat of power didn’t have a syringe? Yet, billions of naira is annually appropriated for that clinic. One can then imagine the fate of other public hospitals.

Those who are angry with Kemi Badenoch for speaking the truth about the Nigerian condition should go and hug transformers in Aso Rock since the ones in their neighborhood won’t be functional. By the way will Aso Rock transformer even work? Wasn’t there a report that the cables were stolen last week? Those boys get mind sha…den go steal presidential cables! Well, rats also chased General Buhari out of the Aso Rock in his time as president! Ah, Nigerians need to join the three sisters in looking for the doctors! We cannot continue like this!