Aristotle said that,'Injustice is not only treating equals as as unequals,it also involves treating unequals as equals.' Robert Greene went ahead to substantiate this as thus,'Treating everyone equally means ignoring their differences,elevating the less skilful and suppressing those who excel .If you attempt to treat everyone equally and fairly,you will confront the problem that some people do certain things better than others.'  Following the line of thoughts of  JOHESU members that,'all are equal and should be paid equally,' let us introduce it to our politics where all our leaders from the councillors to the president receive the same basic salaries and allowances. That means that anybody that fails to be enlisted in the Nigerian army,the person will simply find a shortcut  in Nigerian paramilitary and then become a chief of defence or chief of army staff since all of them are security operators and the said posts are purely administrative?Another error in reasoning ,you know.

   

What else does one expect from a country where if one is convicted of killing ONLY one person by mistake,as part of self defence or out of annoyance,the convict will be sentenced to death by hanging etc but when another is convicted of killing THOUSANDS OF INNOCENT WORSHIPPERS(WOMEN AND CHILDREN INCLUSIVE) in the name of terrorism,that convict will be sentenced to life imprisonment where the convict will be nourished permanently with tax payers' money waiting to be pardoned by the next president ?  Mr John Yakubu Yusufu,one of the eight civil servants being prosecuted last year for massive embezzlements in the Nigeria Police Pension Fund, understood the principles of this inverse Nigerian law when he pleaded,'I ONLY stole N23 billion naira and the government has already seized my 32 property.' Expectedly,the judge gave him a limp tap on the wrist by asking him to pay ONLY N750,000 for him to return home and sin no more,as a waiver for the two years imprisonment earlier handed down to him.

    

Surprisingly,Nigerians started crying foul against that judgement,calling for the head of the judge. I maintained then,and still believe till date that the judge should not be blamed since the function of the judge is to give punishment,after convicting a suspect,according to the section of the law the suspect was charged with, by the law enforcement agents. Today,the government has decided to sack the  working population of the medical profession believing that the problem has been nipped in the bud. Wole Soyinka can now be justified by his illustration of a fledgling head of state in one of his plays,The play of the Giants, who ordered the CBN governor to print more money to execute his selfish project. By sacking resident doctors,our government's action is worse than that of the head of state mentioned above,this is a time a patient can predict his or her own death while in the tertiary hospital and I think the legal unit of the hospitals need to be revamped immediately because the bereaved relatives will now start up their legal litigations over preventable deaths and medical negligence .  Although,we are aware that most of our leaders are representing their pockets, their families and well-wishers,why playing politics again with the health of the patients?If our law does not operate inversely,tell me why JOHESU should be left why resident doctors were sacked?

 

A GOVERNMENT THAT CANNOT BE TRUSTED

Now,let us critically examine some of the claims of the government against doctors .The government said that they have addressed more than 90% of doctors' demands. My knowledge of mathematics( which I singlehandedly got A1) thought me that 90% of 24 will be 21.6,which is approximately 22. Now,adding the term ' MORE ', that means the government has met up with the 24 demands of doctors since the difference between 24 and 22 is just 2,which is infinitesimal. Let the government show us how they arrived at their own 90%  since all these demands were published on the pages of our national newspapers.

   

It is quite regrettable that doctors are dealing with a government that is vacillating that cannot be trusted. Imagine a scenario where the government will issue a circular to doctors in the morning and in the afternoon the same government will issue a conflicting circular to JOHESU and when doctors protest,another circular will be issued to doctors in the evening and this cycle continues.  My friend derisively suggested that,'it is like this federal government carries the circular in their cars etc and when there is any need,they will edit them and issue out.'

    

Remember that NMA wanted to embark on a nationwide strike early January this year but this same government pleaded that six months be given to them that they were going to address the doctors' demands but what did we see at the end? It is still the same government that came out to challenge NMA for a public debate to be presided over by our mostly uninformed Nigerian public,who are the real victims of the ongoing strike. As the lawyers will always say,'No one will be judge over his own case or a case one has interest in.' That is one of the principles of natural law,Nemo iudex in causa sua,but our honourable  minister for health never considered that when he  challenged doctors to a 'duel' so that the uninformed(or do I say,misinformed) victims of the strike will preside over the contest. What another error in reasoning? In view of the above,believe you me, this same government will still disappoint the lecturers in our colleges of education and polytechnics who suspended their strike in order to give the new minister for education time to study their demands. These Nigerian masses that the government and their JOHESU close friends have made to believe that Nigerian doctors are cruel,insensitive,wicked,inconsiderate etc will eventually be the final recipients of this power politics,if not now then later.

  

THE WAY FORWARD

If this government is really serious,which I vehemently doubt, in revolving this impasse in the health sector,the following must be immediately implemented:

 

(1) JOHESU should be disbanded forthwith since their real name should have been anti-doctors union in the health sector. This is because there is no way a group of workers will gang up against the manager and you expect peace in that organisation. An Igbo adage says,if you want to separate fight,u must stop quarrel .Let each individual professional bodies/associations stand on their own and when they deem it necessary to go on strike,they should go alone while the hospital is allowed to function in their absence. I am cocksure that JOHESU will never allow this for a simple reason. When nurses go on strike,doctors called house officers and medical officers along with patients' relatives will bridge the gap. When Radiographers go on strike alone,doctors called radiologists will make their strike uneventful,when medical laboratory scientists say it is their time to embark on strike,doctors called pathologists(medical microbiologists,haematologists,chemical pathologists,histopathologists) will take over while all the side labs manned by doctors become functional. Even the pharmacists know that their functions in the hospitals are now that of the sale's girls/boys,since dispensing of drugs based on doctors' prescriptions is what anybody that understands some dispensing terms can easily do .  

 

I challenge my readers today to make their enquiries round town to find out that many of the attendants that work in pharmacists-owned pharmacy shops ,selling drugs to the public are SSCE-holders. 

 

The maximum educational qualifications of such attendants there are the certificates held by members of NAPTON and  auxiliary nurses .Auxiliary nurses' certificates, to the best of my knowledge, are not backed by any law. Now,coming to government-owned establishments,these pharmacists will sit down dispensing drugs waiting for their monthly salaries,what an economical sabotage and waste of human resources of people that spent at least five years to get their certificates?  This is exactly the way it has been among the  component members of JOHESU ,for an instance,the medical laboratory scientists will be using easy-to-be-read strips in the laboratories,which only require unskilled labour,to do their tests and at the end they clamour to be 'crowned' consultants at least if not for their self-recognition at least for their many years of 'sitting' down to be doing tests that anybody can buy the strips and do at home. No wonder, I am also appealing to NFF to leave Keshi alone and appoint me as the super eagle coach since I have virtually watched all super eagle matches. What another error in reasoning?

 

(2) All allied medical areas must be privatised immediately so that favourable competition can come into our health sector  and the management of the hospitals should contract firms to supply these allied medical services such that any firm that violates the terms of the contract will be shown the way out,the contract terminated and another firm contracted.

 

(3) Medical Laboratory scientists and Pharmacists should be jettisoned under the umbrella of privatization. This will not only sanitize the hospitals but will also go a long way in improving the efficiency as well as creating jobs for thousands of unemployed graduates out there who will work with all diligence knowing that the doctors are the team leaders . Microbiologists, Biochemists and laboratory technicians  should be immediately captured into the one-year internship programmes because they can as well do what these medical laboratory scientists can do under the supervision of well trained pathologists.

 

(4)  Our hospitals should be properly networked through which patients' information should be swimming. This will decongest our record rooms as well as the medical record JOHESU staff. 

 

(5) For the nurses,they should be mandated,possibly through swearing of affidavits, to hold on to their oath , in which they swore to be at service of the physicians. This will stop the scenarios where nurses refuse to accept instructions from house officers and junior resident doctors in our tertiary hospitals

 

(6) All public office holders,whether elected or appointed, should be barred from travelling abroad to seek medical attention unless when doctors in our tertiary hospitals advise otherwise based on the clinical state of such an individual. Nelson Mandela was hospitalized and treated in  South Africa,he was never flown abroad. As we have been adjudged the biggest economy in Africa,do we still allow our political office holders travel abroad to go and check their blood sugar with our tax payers' money?If they receive all their treatments here,our hospitals will be properly equipped because they know that once there is any mistake,they will find themselves in the morgue leaving behind their public embezzled funds to unknown beneficiaries.

 

That will help to bring to an end the scenarios where a complicated surgery will be stated with light powered by the hospital's generated but ended up with lights from cellphones ,torchlights etc among other inefficiencies in the health sector. Each tertiary hospitals will have at least three CT(computed tomography) and three MRI(magnetic resonance imaging) machines operating on three shifts model with employment of more health workers.

 

(7) Pharmacy interns should be doing their one year internship programmes in drug manufacturing firms and medical laboratory science as a course should be proscribed as many of the tests now are automated and are more straightforward, performing most of the tests with strips which anybody can learn in a day.

    

There are more to be done in the health sector but let us take them one after the other. The members of NMA should not worry about the sack of the resident doctors as it is part of political gimmicks which cannot be feasible even under draconian law. The leadership of NMA should not be deterred by this temporary setback and they should continue with the ongoing strike until the government shows serious commitment to permanently and genuinely address the injustices in the health sector since Aristotle said,'We make war that we may live in peace.'

 

By Dr Paul John

08083658038

<[email protected]>

(A port-based medical practitioner )