Like military services, like healthcare services.

While the hands directly battling the insurgents receive peanuts (N1000/day) as their rewards, those who sit in high offices have mega pockets with their cups running over. While they leave the combatants to fate, praying that God protects them, the office occupiers get the best of protection and again the best of war ammunitions are kept for display or showmanship in those offices. Little wonder insurgency seems unquenchable until the N’djamena warriors came dwarfing our technical defeat stories.
During this Corona virus stuff, ALL healthcare workers - attending to patients or formulating policies for patient management-are important. This cannot be overemphasized. Either you work directly treating COVID patients at the frontline or at next line attending to all other ailments including asymptomatic COVID cases which are even more dangerous. It is a perilous time for health workers trust me.
The health sector is however not spared from the rottenness of the Nigerian society. The beautiful N95 masks you see on the television are just meant for the television display by the high and powerful politicians. The only one I have touched physically is kept as a display somewhere otherwise, healthcare givers have no access to them. Talking about personal protective equipment is like preparing for a journey to Pluto.
Even when you put in your best in the manners of General Adeniyi, you end up counting your losses while maintaining that “we are not running”. The ones without contacts with patients, without medical qualifications, sit in the palatial offices determining the future of the front liners. They get the estacode and brew ideas from Sheol like importation of FOREIGN doctors. Ask what they give the ones working here, N5000 or $13 hazard allowance. But for the exigency of COVID-19 and absence of escape route of elites to saner climes, who cares about ventilators, anaesthetic machines, automated external defibrillators, ambulances. Common running taps are a luxury in most tertiary hospitals where surgeons, ever ready to operate fight each other to get operating suites and one sad case, a neurosurgeon had to helplessly defer a borehole surgery for good three weeks due to dry water taps.
While I enjoy the attention given to the health sector at the moment, my fear is the return to the trenches with business as usual when COVID finally succumbs which is sure. I call on the NMA, NARD, PSN, NANNM, JOHESU and all other health related civil societies to jettison their age long differences and fight a common enemy that see through those differences using such to perpetrate corruption in the health sector. I hope the government at the federal, state and local government will henceforth improve on the health budget while incorporating all willing Nigerians into the NHIS which has just 15% coverage for now. Given the right tools, healthcare workers are ever ready to work just as occurs when the military have the right ammunition.
GOD BLESS NIGERIA.