The Pharmaceutical Society of Nigeria (PSN) have condemned the proposed 6.4 percent budgetary allocation to the health sector in 2014 budget bill, describing it as grossly inadequate to meet the nation’s health needs for the year.

 

In an exclusive interview with National Mirror, both associations agreed that the 2014 health budget is not commensurate with either the 15 percent agreed on by the World Health Organisation (WHO) and The Abuja African heads of State’s resolve, and will leave the sector still underfunded as the previous years.

 

Details of the 2014 budget proposal presently before the National Assembly, shows that the health sector is to receive N262.74billion, with N216.4billion (82.38%) earmarked for recurrent expenditure (personnel and overhead) and N46.3bn (17.62%) for capital expenditure.

 

This, however has not gone down well with the PSN. The society’s president, Pharm. Olumide Akintayo, in his reaction, said that the 80 percent recurrent expenditure as budgeted would only be used for the maintenance of personnel to the detriment of the overall well being of Nigerians.

 

According to him, the problem with the 2014 budget is not even with the allocation of mere 6 percent or N262.74 billion ear marked but the utilization of the fund.

 

“The most fundamental question is, how are the previous ones utilized? We cannot continue to sustain a system whereby 80 percent of budget eventually goes on only recurrent expenditures (personnel and overhead). A situation whereby the personnel that are not productive, especially honorary consultants of medical doctors in all Federal institutions, such that over eighty percent of the expenditure goes on the payment of one monument of one cadre of professionals.

 

“In two teaching hospitals in the South West which are located less than 70 kilometers next to each other, we have a total of 376 honorary consultants in medicine. The question is: what are the honorary consultants doing? What do we need these volumes of consultants for? These honorary consultants earn money from their primary employers in the university, they are not supposed to be primary staff of teaching hospital but they come there and earn full salary from the teaching hospitals again, and that is the fraud that is enacted all over the country.

 

“We don’t have funds for and can’t dedicate funds for research and development; we can’t dedicate funds for modern equipment and infrastructure, and these are things that could have aided better diagnosis and ultimately would have aided therapeutic outcomes, better health outcomes”.

 

Pharm Akintayo surmised that no amount of money could be useful under such misappropriation of fund.

 

“Now if we dedicate like 10 billion dollars to that type of sector that have that kind of wasteful expenditure pattern, of course we are not going to achieve anything. So what we should be concerned with is what is it budgeted for? And I think once you redress that fundamental distortion, we can be on the way to winning the war”.