Hajia Aisha Buhari, the wife of the president, had stated repeatedly the rotten underbelly of the health sector, when she used the Aso Clinic as her guinea pig to underscore the outright neglect of the health sector. Last week, the Secretary to the Government of the Federation, (SGF), Mr. Boss Mustapha, in a fit of anger, told his audience during a press conference that, but for the new role he was playing as Chairman of the Presidential Task Force on COVID-19, he would not have known the level of rottenness in the health sector. His position further strengthened the point raised by Cardinal Olubunmi Okogie, who said in his press statement two weeks ago, that this global pandemic would help government to look into the health sector that had long been abandoned. The true confession of the Secretary to Government is a confirmation of the total neglect of the health sector particularly by the 5-year old administration of the All Progressive Congress,(APC). His rebuttal was a ninth day wonder. He was captured on tape reading from a prepared speech until he decided to speak extempore to buttress the point being made. And you could see the anger of a man, a principal actor in President Buhari’s kitchen cabinet at that, boiling over the decayed infrastructure in the health sector. No thanks to COVID-19 for making it possible for such exposure.
When Mrs. Buhari alerted the nation about the fact that the Aso Clinic could not boast of any tangible medical services, it sent many tongues wagging. But the reality soon dawn on us that in fact, she was making a honest disclosure. Despite budgetary allocations running into billions, she could possibly not understand why the Aso Clinic remains neglected and abandoned. She wondered aloud what the Chief Medical Director was doing with all the budgets over the years. When you add up her frustrations with that of Boss Mustapha, you are surely going to rationalise the claim that this government has been largely outsourced to the cabal, because the man who was elected as president does not have his hands on the jar of leadership. It is a matter of fact that this government has ran five budgets since 2015 and the health sector had had its own share of the budgets. What is however shrouded in secrecy is the total releases from those budgets in order to put the right figures in place. This government’s attitude to capital expenditure has been one of disdain, where very limited resources are released for funding capital projects. Nothing much has been achieved in that sector and the confessions of the SGF are a further confirmation of this lapse.
It is no longer news that Buhari’s presidency is one that is largely taciturn, withdrawn and inactive. When situation calls for serious leadership display, president Buhari is often found wanting. At the onset of this COVID-19 pandemic, when it was paramount and pertinent for President Buhari to show leadership and set the tone for a holistic response to the pandemic, he was speech-shy. When he finally addressed the nation and rolled out his lockdown directive, you could hardly lay your hands on any concrete roadmap to confronting the pandemic. Even now that Lagos, Abuja and Ogun have been on lockdown for two weeks, one could hardly see what is being done in practical terms to warrant the lockdown in the first place. In other climes where there are lockdowns, you could see large-scale fumigation exercises to dis-infect the environment. You could also feel the response of government in providing for the vulnerable. Back home in Nigeria, what we hear are billions of naira being shared without the identities of the beneficiaries. The Special Adviser to the President on Social Investment Programme Mrs. Uwais, reportedly said it was unnecessary for the identities of the beneficiaries to be made public. What a society we are!.
Aside from Lagos state government that has shown pro-active leadership in confronting this pandemic, the Presidential Task Force has been busy with press conferences rolling out the number of cases. The vulnerables have been left to lick their wounds. The suffering has eaten deeper into the consciousness of those who depend on daily income to eke a living. The Minister for Health, Dr. Ehanire appears more confused in the exercise, telling us that he was not aware if health workers were being paid hazard allowance. How pitiable! At a time when public accountability is key to tracking governmental expenditure, Buhari’s government, that prides itself as one of anti-corruption, is busy sharing palliatives hand-to-hand against the doctrine of social distancing. Two weeks ago, President Buhari gave a directive that every stadium in those places affected by the lockdown should be converted to isolation centres. Two weeks after, apart from Lagos that had earlier taken its own proactive measures, every other stadium remains the way they have been. National stadium, Abuja has no isolation facility. Aside from decaying facilities within the stadium, the stadium is suffering from total neglect and abandonment. It is a familiar story that runs through the DNA of this government, a metaphor for our collective failure as a country.
When a government is driven by tokenism and adhocism, what you get are temporary reliefs that cannot endure the test of time. At the outset, president Buhari and the APC had spoken eloquently about putting a stop to medical tourism by investing in, and reviving the health sector. Some of the proposals were captured in its campaign manifesto, but as soon as it got into power, it discarded its own manifesto and abandoned the mouth-watering promises it had earlier made to Nigerians. President Buhari became the chief medical tourist to the United Kingdom, and for little headache, government officials easily find their ways outside the country to seek medical attention. How would they have the time to pay devoted attention to the decay in the health sector back home? It is the reason why the sector has remained comatose with no clear-cut health policy that could respond to the growing sophistication of diseases and viruses the world over. It got further humiliation when the COVID-19 struck without notice and exposed what has been papered for so long. This is not to say it is not an accumulation of improper conducts by successive governments, just that, this present administration which promised heaven has left the sector steeped in hell.
When a high ranking, principal officer in a government laments so lugubriously, expressing the illwind in his inner self, you can imagine the depth of the rot that stares him in the face. His denial was just an after thought. When government is being reminded of its responsibility in the different sectors of the economy, it is to spur them on to the ugly realities that dominate our daily discourse as a nation still grappling with the leadership question. If previous governments made efforts to narrow the huge gap in infrastructure, the present administration appears too withdrawn from taking further responsibility to up the ante. Imagine the whereabouts of the Chief of Staff to the president being kept in secrecy at a time when British Prime Minister Boris Johnson was being wheeled out of public hospital where he was treated of coronavirus infection. Many of our public officials do not patronise public health institutions, reason why it has been left to rot in such quantum.
We need to seriously take urgent steps to recover our nation from its backwardness in almost every facet of our national life. We must begin to think proactively on how to mitigate the negative economic impact that this lockdown has brought to bear on a population that is detained in poverty and hunger. It is not about knowing the rots in the system, it is getting prepared to fixing them that should matter at this point. After the lockdown, we are going to slide into economic recession and the earlier we began to take proactive steps to inject new thinking into the process of rejuvenating the economy, the better for us. This is not the time for empty rhetorics. It is a time that requires practical leadership that is result-driven to respond to the numerous challenges at hand. We are encumbered by insecurity, insurgency, kidnapping, armed banditry, decayed road infrastructure and outright neglect of the health sector. The billions that were reportedly released should be used to solve some of the urgent needs to give a face-lift to a sector that drives our collective adrenaline. To delay further will be dangerous.
NB: Prince Kassim Afegbua, a former Commissioner for Information and Orientation in Edo State wrote in for The New Diplomat from Abuja.
