THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES has cleared the second reading of a bill apparently aimed at reducing the flight of young Nigerian physicians to foreign nations in search of better pastures.
The Bill, sponsored by Ganiyu John (APC Alimosho, Lagos), is an Act to alter the Medical and Dental Practitioners Act of 2004.
According to the sponsor, the change is intended to require Nigerian-trained medical physicians to serve at least five years before they may move overseas for greener pastures.
His justification is that the government pays a lot of money to subsidize their education. Before they may depart, they must provide at least five years to the country.
On the surface, this Bill appears to make a lot of sense. According to the Nigerian Medical Association, NMA, between 2015 and last year, Nigeria lost almost 10,000 physicians. In a country of around 213 million people, there are presently just 24,000 doctors, down from approximately 34,000 in 2015. This indicates that there is just one doctor accessible to treat 9,083 Nigerians. According to the World Health Organization, a nation with our population size requires at least 363,000 doctors.
However, we feel that Hon. Johnson’s solution to this problem has not been adequately considered. It has the hallmarks of a typical military mindset that believes that merely issuing a directive would solve a problem.
How can this legal shackling truly curb brain drain in the medical field? Every Nigerian has the constitutional freedom to move about freely. No law enacted by the National Assembly may restrict a citizen’s freedom of movement.
The sector’s brain drain problem is not limited to doctors. It is more focused on medical professionals, such as physicians, nurses, and others. Nurses join the physicians in their departure. Will the Bill bind the nurses as well?
Doctors are paid pennies on the dollar; others are due months. We can’t impoverish physicians while also imprisoning them.
It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out what we need to do to keep our medical professionals and even recruit expatriates to our system.
To appropriately cater for the wellbeing of its professionals, we must follow in the footsteps of other successful countries and spend extensively in the health sector at all levels.
Our public hospitals must be equipped and maintained. We must improve our health-care system so that our leaders want to be treated in Nigeria rather than the existing habit of racing to hospitals overseas and leaving the very clinics they created.
Subsidizing our doctors’ education is simply one part of the answer. We must also appropriately cater for their wellbeing and offer them with a suitable working environment.
This Bill is nothing more than a PR gimmick for Hon. Johnson. We require comprehensive health-care reform, which should be a presidential effort.
