The House of Representatives is trying to treat cancer with panadol. That is what the doctors’ anti-migration bill now being debated in the house amounts to. If it becomes law, newly qualified doctors from Nigerian universities would practice for five years before they are fully licensed. That in effect restricts them from migrating prematurely to greener pastures in Europe and North America.
The lawmakers are very worried that 5, 000 Nigerian doctors migrated to Britain alone in the last eight years. Twice that number might have migrated to U.S. and Canada.
Again, twice that number of nurses might have fled the country. The medical personnel deficit is a global phenomenon. One hospital in New York needs 250 nurses but is managing with 50. Nigeria is a fertile recruiting ground.
On November 17, 2022, Lagos State School of Nursing, Igando inducted 60 nurses and mid-wives into Nigerian Nursing and Midwifery Council.
Unlike the wider Nigerian society where graduates beg for jobs, the graduating nurses were begged to pick up offers in various establishments.
The representative of Lagos state commissioner for health at the event announced that the state government would employ the 60 inductees. The chief medical director (CMD) of Lagos State University Teaching Hospital (LASUTH) told the inductees that any of them who shows up at LASUTH on Monday, November 21, would pick a job automatically.
One of the speakers at the induction asked the new nurses if they were willing to pick up the offers. Only five of the 60 inductees volunteered to pick the offers.
The rest were either eying greener pastures in Europe and North America or attractive jobs with six digit pays within Nigeria.
Nigerian universities churn out a minimum of 5, 000 doctors annually. Ironically, Nigeria is persistently plagued by outrageous doctor-to-patient ratio of one to 5, 000 patients as against the World Health Organisation’s (WHO) requirement of one to 600 patients.
That is the consequence of the mass exodus to greener pastures. Ironically, the bill being debated in the House of Representatives amounts to a palliative designed to treat the symptom while the actual disease (catastrophic condition of service in the health sector) surges on and consumes the patients.
The bill in the house is silent on the surging cost of training doctors and who bears it. The bill intends to bond doctors whose training the federal government did not finance. It is the height of duplicity. It stands the law of natural justice on its head.
Most of the private universities train doctors at annual tuition fees ranging from N1.5 million. In some of the state-owned universities medical students’ fees hover around N500, 000 per session.
Annual fees in the cheapest school of nursing, including the one owned by Lagos state government is in the range of N300, 000. Some charge as high as N800, 000.
Up to the 1990s, nursing education in Nigeria was free. In addition to the free tuition fees, the student nurses were on salary GL-4 for the duration of their training. No one does that any longer.
Instead, the House of Representatives wants parents to train their children for seven years at very high cost only to donate them to the fatherland at starving wages.
Ironically, the National Assembly is the primary cause of the horrendous working conditions that trigger the mass exodus by medical doctors.
The 2023 budget of the 469 members of the National Assembly is almost twice the personnel cost of thousands of doctors, pharmacists and nurses in federal government hospitals.
The 469 members of the National Assembly hypocritically and in utmost display of man’s inhumanity to man, egoistically allocate to themselves a disproportionate sum of N228 billion for the year.
A Nigerian senator with school certificate earns N27.7 million monthly while a professor in a federal university fights poverty with a monthly pay of N413, 000.
The doctors the bill in the House of Representatives want to bond are working in deplorable conditions in different parts of the country.
As rich as Lagos State government is, the sky scraper at Mariner which serves as residential quarters for doctors working in Lagos Island Hospital is an eye sore.
Three house officers in the facility share a toilet and a kitchen. The tall building which contests height with Nitel building standing next to it has erratic elevators that fail persistently.
Most of the times the water supply fails and the doctors have to fetch water from the ground and climb to the highest floor of the building.
The working condition of the house officers borders on slave labour. Some work for four straight days without getting home to refresh and change.
The selfish lawmakers toiling to bond people they did not fund their training have allocated a disproportionate chunk of Nigeria’s resources to themselves and want those whose parents took loans to train to remain in perpetual poverty.
The ill-conceived bill in the House of Representatives is dead on arrival. It is already drawing flak from stakeholders in the health sector. The National Association of Resident Doctors (NARD) has warned the law makers that the bill they are debating is evil. NARD lamented that the devilish bill was being debated in the house at a time the federal government was heavily indebted to hundreds of resident doctors. Even the Devil does not bond people he did not mentor.
The House of Representatives has taken its egotism a few rungs above devilish proportions. Everyone knows that Nigeria’s cruel income distribution system is at the root of the mass exodus of needed medical personnel.
The weird income distribution system allocates a disproportionate chunk of resources to very few politicians and top civil servants and starves the health sector catastrophically. Members of the National Assembly are key beneficiaries of the skewed income distribution system.
Government must declare free tuition for medical students if they must be bonded. Besides, anti-migration law can only work after government has tackled the deplorable working conditions that compel doctors and nurses to flee Nigeria.
