No health, no wealth (1)

This Day

5 August 2011

No health, no wealth (1)

Nasir El-rufai.  

This week, Nigeria lost Chief Edwin Ume-Ezeoke, the former Speaker of the House of Representatives in the Second Republic. He died in India. May his soul find peace. Chief Ezeoke joins a long list of Nigerian political and economic elite that now live mostly in Nigeria and die in foreign countries in search of better healthcare.

And it is symptomatic of our failure to build on the foundations laid by our founding fathers to grow our human capital through creative planning, sensible spending prioritisation and focused implementation.

Our nation has conceived several five-year development plans from Independence until the mid-1980s. The overthrow of the Buhari-Idiagbon administration marked the death of multi-year development planning. Since then, we had toyed with perspective plans and rolling plans under Ibrahim Babangida, Vision 2010 under Sani Abacha, then the NEEDS programme in Olusegun Obasanjo's second term, leading to what is now Vision 20:2020. No sectors have suffered more than education and healthcare from our abandonment of development planning in our governance strategies.

The challenges of the Nigerian health sector bring to bear the popular philosophical postulation: “a person that fails to plan plans to fail”. The first casualty of non-planning was the relegation of preventive, mostly primary healthcare, abolition of sanitary inspection and increasing focus on procurement-driven curative, secondary and tertiary healthcare.

Olikoye Ransome-Kuti's tenure as health minister brought back some needed focus on primary healthcare, with the publication of a National Health Policy in 1988.  But the centralised regulation of the military regime of primary healthcare created its own problems which we live with. As we shall see, it appears that like with everything else in Nigeria, decentralisation, true federalism and inter-state competition works better for the citizens.

The 1988 health policy was refined, revised and updated under the tenure of Health Minister Eyitayo Lambo in 2004 and was globally acclaimed as a near-perfect blueprint for provision of standard healthcare in a growing nation.  The policy had all that was needed to make our health sector functional and world class.