WANTED: A New Health Minister

Posted on: Wed 24-08-2016

Sonnie Ekwowusi urges the minister to attend to other health needs of the people rather than on means to control the population

* Good Living is not Determined by Population but by the Seriousness of Government to Improve the Living Condition of the People

Clearly, the current Health Minister, Prof. Isaac Adewole is not the person that Nigeria needs at the moment to tackle her serious primary healthcare delivery challenges. Apart from telling Nigerian women that they have a “right” to commit abortion, Prof. Adewole has not demonstrated that he can positively transform Nigeria’s healthcare sector. Shortly after his inauguration as Nigeria’s Health Minister the first health gift which Adewole offered to Nigerian women was what he dubbed “expanded access to comprehensive abortion care”. As if that was not enough, Prof. Adewole was on Channels TV last week to market his population control gift. He wants Nigerian families to stop having children. He wants married Nigerian women to be on pregnancy- terminating pills in order to avoid having children. Prof. Adewole is obviously under the influence and sponsorship of the United Nations Populations Funds (UNFPA) and The Guttmacher Institute, two agencies which are notorious in Africa for pressuring African governments to reduce human capital through abortion and use of contraceptives. Whereas Adewole has not articulated any serious primary healthcare programme that would benefit the Nigerian poor who still lack access to the much-vaunted primary health care system, he is more inclined in venturing into irrelevant complex demographic issues.

In other words, Adewole has abandoned medicine and the real health needs of the Nigerian people and now meddling with demographic issues. What a paradox! Is President Muhammadu Buhari not aware that attempts to implement population control policy by successive Nigerian governments have consistently failed? For example, when Goodluck Jonathan was in power he entrusted the then chairman of the National Population Commission (NPC) to Festus Odimegwu and 22 others with the task of controlling the Nigerian population through birth-control and all that. Chief Odimegwu said something at that time that shocked many people: he said that the NPC did not know the population of Nigeria, and that the various population figures declared in the past by the NPC and governmentowed agencies were based on distorted and fictitious figures presented by the World Bank, United Nations and other international bodies. According to Chief Odimegwu, “we do not really know our population; that is the truth of the matter. We do our work but politicians interfere and at the end, you do not really know what population or census figures are….” Answering question from The Punch Newspaper during a courtesy visit to the NPC by a delegation of the UNFPA, Odimegwu said, “…the population of China is over two billion, India is 1.2 billion. Nigeria ranks about the 10th in the world population. If other countries are surviving, I don’t think we will kill ourselves...The important thing is having the resources to make people live a good life. Good living is not determined by the population but by so many other things. If some countries have large populations and are living well, Nigerians can also have good lives.”

Odimegwu was right. Good living is not determined by population but by the seriousness of government to improve the living condition of the people. Certainly Prof Adewole’s new population control policy will bring a bad image to the Buhari government. Therefore, President Buhari should act fast and appoint a new health minister to replace Adewole. Prof. Adewole clearly lacks focus. What has population control got to do with the urgent health needs of the Nigerian people? If Adewole is looking for something to control, why can’t he control diseases such as malaria, typhoid, polio, high blood pressure, hypertension and so forth that have been killing many Nigerians? Look at exponential rate with which cancer, especially cervical and breast cancer, is spreading across Nigeria and killing many Nigerians. Why not set up cancer screening centres across Nigeria? Is the federal government not aware that many public health institutions in Nigeria lack essentials drugs? Why budget huge sums of money for population control when you cannot provide ordinary drugs in our public hospitals especially in our rural health centres and clinics in Nigeria? Why not use the money budgeted for population control to pay striking doctors?

Last week I visited a medical consultant friend of mine at the University of Nigeria Teaching Hospital (UNTH) Enugu. In the course of our conversation, this diligent doctor informed me that primary and secondary health care systems are virtually non-existent in Nigeria. He regretted that everybody is rushing to tertiary health to the utter neglect of community medicine and basic rural medicine that are most beneficial to Nigeria’s numerous rural dwellers. He shocked me with the sad stories of the uncountable children from Enugu, Nsukka, Abakaliki and their environs who die from preventable diseases before they are brought to UNTH.

By: Zayyad I. Muhammad, Jimeta, Adamawa State

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