A senior lawyer and rights activist, Mr Femi Falana, SAN, has urged African leaders to increase investment in the area of public health so as to better tackle current and future health challenges in the continent.
He made the call on Monday in Owerri, Imo State, while delivering a paper on lessons learnt from the Covid-19 pandemic.
Falana who noted that “no one is safe until everyone is safe” lamented that rich countries of the world are hoarding vaccines to the detriment of poor countries, hence African leaders should begin to take the issue of health services more seriously.
“But the approach to a global public health emergency is not only selfish, it is also scientifically myopic. As long as the virus exists in any country, it could spread to other countries”, he said.
Speaking on some of the lessons learnt from the pandemic, the senior lawyer said that public healthcare system cannot be developed by applying the logic of market forces.
“Public health services should be treated as social goods because a pandemic is a challenge to the common good. The implication is that government should invest more in public health.
“Nigeria, for instance, devotes less than 5% of its budget to healthcare. Little surprise that the response of Nigeria to the pandemic has been extremely weakened by the manifestation of poverty in the healthcare system”.
While observing that most of the states were yet to comply with the law on universal healthcare coverage, he stated that health insurance still remains essentially an idea whose time is yet to come in Nigeria