Aso Rock's Clinic of Infamy

ASO ROCK's CLINIC OF INFAMY

BY EMMANUEL ONWUBIKO



Anybody who has never gone through a near-death experience may not fully appreciate what it means to go through the valley of the shadow of death that has become the daily routine in most public hospitals in Nigeria.

It is a fact that Patients who are not financially empowered and left with the option of patronising the publicly owned general or local health centers are meant to go through a near-death situation because of the certainty of the uncertainty of quality of treatments and drugs that such a poor patient would get.

The public health system in Nigeria has systematically collapsed under the heavy weight of perennial and persistent managerial corruption, inefficiency and ineffectiveness of officials of government.

All that a researcher needs to do to gauge the real situation of affairs in the nation’s public healthcare is to pay a visit to any general hospital anywhere in Nigeria and to take the pains to visit the laboratory and ask the relevant questions of the functionality or workability of the critical infrastructures in and  around the hospital. Such critical factors like survival rates, patient safety, specialized staff and hospital reputation are not available in much of these public hospitals and these are essential factors for determining the standards of hospitals.

The first sign of doom that would stare you on the face the moment you enter a public health facility anywhere in Nigeria is the environmental insanity and degradation. You would be shocked to see medical workers competing for space with rodents and cockroaches.

The medical and non-medical staff do also run their petty businesses by the side making the public hospitals appear like a multipurpose shopping complex.

The next bad sign to notice is that the moment power supply system from the national grid is switched off as is often the case with the epileptic electricity power supply system in the country, you would notice that most of these public health facilities lack functional generators to power the critical health equipment. Virtually all the public hospitals that can afford run diesel powered generating sets as sources of their electricity power thereby spreading pollutants around the environment and further exposing their patients to the risks associated with environmental pollution.

A story was once told of a man who took his relative for common surgery of appendicitis but had to also go to the general hospital with a generating set just so the procedure would not be interrupted by poor power supply.

The public healthcare system in the country is going through some of the worst forms of criminal negligence and abandonment.

One reason for this is the phenomenon of foreign medical tourism by most government officials and their family members.

Another related cause of the total degeneration of quality in the public healthcare is the lack of professional supervision and the next giant reason is the porous mechanisms of public procurements that create room for corruption.

The Bureau for Public Procurement is weighed down by multifaceted factors of corruption and bureaucratic inefficiencies.

I will return to discuss the causative factors that have led to the gradual and systematic collapse of the public healthcare but first let us examine emerging scandals from the presidential medical facility in Abuja.

The wife of President Muhammadu Buhari, Mrs. Aisha Buhari is in the news as expressing her disappointment about the poor state of facilities at the Aso Rock Clinic.

The wife of the president expressed her frustration at the total non-availability of basic amenities at the prime health facility set up by the federal government to take care of the health and related well-being of the members of the political class within the presidency and also the staff who work within the confines of the presidency.

The presidential clinic is known to be one of the most heavily funded govern