The recent remarks by former presidential spokesperson Femi Adesina that the late former President Muhammadu Buhari would have died long ago if he had used Nigerian hospitals highlight a troubling disconnect from the everyday reality of most Nigerians.
Development Diaries reports that Buhari, who served as the country’s military Head of State from 1983 to 1985 and as a democratically elected president from 2015 to 2023, died on Sunday in a clinic in London, United Kingdom, after a prolonged illness.
‘If he had said, “I will do my medicals in Nigeria”, just as a show off or something, he could have long been dead’, he said.
While ordinary Nigerians struggle for bedspace in overcrowded general hospitals, bring their own gloves to childbirth, and lose loved ones in traffic due to the absence of oxygen, political leaders routinely fly abroad for medical treatment.
In fact, during his eight-year reign, the late Buhari spent more than 200 days in London for medical treatment. That’s nearly seven months.
If the former president could not trust his own country’s hospitals, what hope do the rest of Nigerians have? If the president’s health could not survive Nigerian care, what does that say about the rest of Nigerians still struggling in the waiting room?
Adesina claims Buhari needed to stay alive to fix the system. While that is a noble excuse, the system never got fixed. Under Buhari, resident doctors went on strike at least five times, with Nigeria losing over 5,000 health professionals to countries like the UK, Canada, and Saudi Arabia, and health budgets remained a rounding error in national priorities.
At one point, even the State House Clinic, where only the first family and VIPs are treated, had no functional X-ray machine. Recall that the first lady, Aisha Buhari, complained that they did not even have paracetamol.
So here we are, told by one of the most senior voices in the last administration that the president had no faith in his country’s own healthcare system, with the ordinary Nigerian left with warnings about fake drugs, doctors who are overworked and underpaid, and facilities where you have to bring your own cotton wool.
If, while in office, the late Buhari had to travel abroad just to stay alive, what hope is there for the tomato seller in Minna battling high blood pressure, the fisherman in Yenagoa suffering from a hernia, or the university student in Kaduna down with malaria but unable to afford a simple test?
And for us at Development Diaries, the larger tragedy here is what this says about trust. How can a government ask citizens to trust public hospitals when it will not trust them with the president’s own life?
Why were billions of naira spent on the presidential clinic with no results? Why did we not at least get one top-tier hospital where the average Nigerian could walk in without needing a minister’s phone number?
We must stop treating this as normal and start demanding that healthcare be a true political priority, not just another forgotten promise buried in campaign speeches.
