The commendations this time

It is the business of a newspaper to get at the facts. Where two or more dispute facts, the newspaper, as neutral observer, must go in there to find the facts and tell the public which party is lying and which is telling the truth. Some disputes are not so easily resolved by a newspaper because circumstances or the nature of the dispute itself make it difficult for it to point an accusing finger. Here is a good example.

Early this month, the Nigerian Air Force, NAF, for several days bombed what it believed to be the hideouts of the killers called bandits holding Zamfara State hostage. NAF told the public its bombing missions were successful. They killed all the targeted bandits. The state was about to become safe again.

But the state council of traditional rulers threw ashes in the mouth of NAF when it alleged that the bombs killed innocent civilians. There was a brief ding-dong with the council being quoted or misquoted as denying its statement. However, when some members of the council insisted the bomb killed civilians, NAF challenged the council to provide evidence for this. The council took up the challenge.

On April 17, the council named eleven civilians it claimed were killed in the NAF bombing raids. It also named eleven others who sustained injuries from shrapnel. NAF did not respond to this.

Daily Trust tried to get at the facts but in the end, it could not tell us, between NAF and the council, who spoke the truth. The problem was that it could not carry out an independent investigation into the raids because insecurity in the state made it unsafe and therefore impossible for its reporters to visit the villages where the bombs allegedly killed the civilians. When a newspaper faces this sort of dilemma the story usually runs its course without the public knowing the full facts of an incident.

In this particular instance, the newspaper ended up by fully telling one side of the story because the traditional rulers refused to be cowed into eating their words. The Daily Trust front page lead story of April 18, “Zamfara emirs name civilians killed in NAF raids,” told a believable story from the point of view of the traditional rulers. Perhaps NAF decided it was wiser not to join issues with them. Bombing mistakes are not unusual in combat situations. Civilians do get killed or wounded because of such mistakes attributed to collateral damages.

I commend the newspaper for its relentless pursuit of the facts, although it was not able to balance them because one side padlocked its lips. I commend the traditional council too for the courage to speak truth to power.

In its issue of April 25, Daily Trust reported reactions of the Nigerian Medical Association, NMA, to the claim by Dr Chris Ngige, minister of labour and employment, that Nigeria had surplus medical doctors and that the brain drain in the health sector was not causing him loss of sleep. Its front page headline was: “NMA fumes as Ngige says Nigeria has surplus doctors.”

The newspaper went beyond the fuming medical doctors and did an impressive and professional job of debunking the claim by the minister. I would not know if the minister, a medical doctor himself, has been living on another planet but I know he was not talking about this country that has had, in desperation, to recruit medical doctors who did not even speak English, just to remedy the crying shortage of doctors. I know of no country that treats its health sector with greater cynical contempt than our own country.

The newspaper published facts that should make the minister hide his face in shame. Those facts bear repeating if only to show that some of our public officers are too full of themselves to realise how ignorant they really are about their own country. These were the facts established by Daily Trust:

1. Nigeria has 450,000 practising doctors.
2. The World Health Organisation, WHO, recommends patient-doctor ratio of 600.
3. Nigeria has 5,000 patients to one doctor. This is the worst in Africa.
4. Nigeria has been spending less than five per cent of its annual budget on the health sector. This is far below the African Union bench mark of 15%.

Nothing is right with our health sector. And that should worry Ngige, particularly as a medical doctor. There has been a steady brain drain in that sector since the 1980’s. The last time someone checked, there were about 5,000 Nigerian doctors in the UK alone. Perhaps, many more of them are in the Middle East and the United States.

The brain drain in the sector is not just about people being free to relocate to more professionally conducive areas of greener pastures. It is a total loss for the country. These men and women were trained at great public expense to provide critical professional services in the health sector. Anyone of them who leaves for a country that pays better, equips its health facilities better and provides a more conducive environment to health providers than Nigeria is a colossal loss to our country. According to the Daily Trust report, it costs an African country, on the average, between $21,000 and $59,000 to train a medical doctor. That is not a chicken feed, even for a country famous for its oil wealth.

My fear is that Ngige is not alone in his cynical attitude towards this huge national problem. I am prepared to bet that some other public officers feel the same way about the brain drain in other sectors such as education because they tend to look at the small picture. Our investment in education is one of the lowest in Africa. We have never reached the UNESCO bench mark of 26% of the annual budget being committed to education. The best we have done so far was a paltry ten per cent. How can our country be a big player in modern development? Never mind the number of universities, private and public and the many more applications before the NUC. The problem is that we have lost our focus on education. Our tertiary institutions have largely been turned into degree mills.

Perhaps, Ngige was blissfully unaware of the pathetic condition of our public and teaching hospitals. Ngige should be the first man to carry a placard to protest this. We, certainly, cannot do better by committing five per cent of the annual budget to the health sector. And so, we cannot halt the brain drain. If Christ Ngige chooses to drink to that I could not begrudge him.