Nigeria: Health for All Abroad

Based on a global pledge to commit to universal access to health in 1978, governments all over the world enthusiastically mouthed the slogan "Health for All by the Year 2000". Twelve years after that magical year and only two years to the next one, 2015, the pledge of the Nigerian government appears to have become "Health for all our citizens abroad".

Our new culture of going abroad for medical treatment is evidence that our government has progressively contracted our health services to foreign countries whose governments have seen it fit to maintain a robust health sector for their citizens.

The claim by the chairman, Senate Committee on Health, Senator Ifeanyi Okowa, that Nigerians spend N80 billion on medical tourism overseas every year is the most recent admission that rich and influential Nigerians outsource our health services to foreign countries.

The government is no doubt aware of the negative consequences of this practice. An extant circular which bars government employees from traveling abroad for medical treatment with public funds except for special reasons will be in order.

Nigerians who can afford to pay for treatment overseas should do so. However, many that are not so rich are being forced to go abroad because there are few safe alternatives at home. Dying abroad may have become fashionable, but medical tourism is not the only loss of national investment in our healthcare delivery system.

Senator Okowa should extend his timely prognosis to the monetary cost of Nigerian medical personnel who leave home to practise abroad after being trained in local universities as beneficiaries of public fund. The cost of educating many, if not most, of 2,392 Nigerian doctors who were practising in the United States of America and 1,529 in the United Kingdom as at 2005 was borne by poor Nigerian taxpayers.

Both practices of Nigerians purchasing healthcare services abroad and our skilled health personnel migrating to rich foreign lands question the patriotic instincts of Nigerians in a larger number of cases. But the two trends have a common origin in the state of our health institutions.