Posted on: Sat 03-10-2026

Abuja - While Nigeria's hospitals bleed from the exodus of nurses to the UK, Canada and Saudi Arabia, the Senate is quietly advancing a bill that could cripple the very body holding the nursing profession together.

It is SB.1001, the Nursing and Midwifery (Registration, etc) Act (Amendment) Bill sponsored by Senate Leader Senator Bamidele Michael Opeyemi, and its purpose is chillingly simple: to reduce the number of members of the Nursing and Midwifery Council of Nigeria.

The NMCN is the last line of defence for over half a million nurses and midwives. It is the body that decides who is a real nurse and who is a quack, which school is accredited and which is a death trap, what standard of care keeps a mother alive in the labour room. To shrink it at this moment is not a reform, it is an amputation.

Insiders are warning that fewer members means fewer practicing nurses at the table, fewer voices from the states and from the wards where the real work happens. It creates a small, easily controlled board in Abuja, dominated by political appointees, while the professionals who actually wear the uniform are pushed out of their own regulation. This is how self-regulation dies and political capture begins.

A weakened council cannot fight the explosion of fake nursing schools and unlicensed clinics. It cannot enforce discipline, it cannot protect patients from quackery, and it certainly cannot advocate for the welfare of nurses who are already stretched beyond breaking point. At a time when the world is expanding nursing councils to accommodate more specialties and more expertise, Nigeria is moving in reverse.

For the average Nigerian, the consequence will be felt not in the Senate chamber but in the clinic. A toothless council means more quacks in scrubs, more unregulated training centres, and lower standards at the bedside.

For nurses themselves, the message is devastating. Instead of strengthening their voice to address poor pay, terrible working conditions and mass migration, the system wants to make that voice smaller.

If this bill sails through the public hearing on Friday at the Senate Conference Hall, the future of nursing in Nigeria will be decided by a handful of people, without the nurses themselves.

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