The Nigerian presidency has announced that President Muhammadu Buhari will inaugurate what it named the ‘state-of-the-art Presidential/VIP Wing of State House Medical Centre’ on Friday.
Development Diaries reports that the State House Director of Information, Abiodun Oladunjoye, made this known in a statement.
He described the project as ‘a demonstration of the Buhari administration’s commitment to advancing health care management in the country’.
The question then is, how?
How is the inauguration of a medical facility in the State House a demonstration of Buhari’s commitment to health care when the masses cannot access it?
How is it a demonstration of his commitment to the sector when resident doctors are currently on strike due to the failure of the government to address their genuine health care needs?
According to an investigation by Punch, as of December 2022, Buhari had spent at least 225 days away from the country on medical trips since assuming office in May 2015.
The report also revealed that the Buhari administration earmarked at least N33.3 billion for the State House medical infrastructure in the past eight years.
Last week, the presidency announced in a statement that the president would remain in London, United Kingdom, for an additional week, to see his dentist.
While thousands of Nigerians perish from malaria and typhoid fever because many of the country’s public hospitals are inoperable, the president has spent billions of naira taking care of himself.
Yet, the State House Director of Information could make such a condemnable statement about Buhari’s commitment to health care, which is a marketing of the administration’s failure in the health sector.
Nigeria has failed for the umpteenth time to meet the Abuja Declaration by African leaders in 2001 and the World Health Organisation (WHO) to allocate, at least, 15 percent of yearly national budgets to health.
The country lacks the means or the motivation to fulfil the goal, unlike nations like Rwanda and South Africa, which have done so by spending at least 15 percent of their entire budgets on health.
Despite holding a key position in Africa, the continent’s most populous nation has a poor reputation in the health sector. Nigeria was listed as having some of the most deficient health systems in the world in a 2018 assessment by the medical publication, The Lancet.
Development Diaries calls on the presidency to retract its comment on Buhari’s commitment to health care and apologise to Nigerians over the outgoing administration’s failure to meet the country’s health needs.
Photo source: State House
