My last week’s piece where I blatantly called the whole incompetent lot killers really got to them. Plenty of them reached out to me, including the beautiful Ngozi who screamed, ‘Edgar WTF’. The generalisation of the piece angered them: that I cannot just say that all doctors are incompetent and self-preserving cabal. For those who did not understand literature, that piece is called a trigger piece—deliberately aimed at causing a disturbance and shaking the table.
They have said to me, why didn’t I go to the hospital in question and engage them. That would be the most stupid thing to do because then the matter will just be isolated between Edgar and that rubbish in Ikoyi. The matter is much bigger than that. It is a systematic collapse. A stupendous erosion of ethics cascades through the profession, weakening structures and causing the untimely death of many. You see, in my eyes, as long as just one Nigerian loses his life through the incompetence of one doctor, then all of them are complicit. That is me. Come and see the messages I have been receiving. Gory tales of needless suffering and deaths Nigerians have been facing. It is not just Mena Joseph Edgar. Daily, Nigerians are dying, and something has to be done about it. We can’t all continue to be leaving it to God. Mbok, this is too much.
People will say it is the system. It is Nigeria. Well, I can pardon the education, banking and the rest but not health. This is life we are all playing with. How do you reconcile going to a general hospital and get referred to a private hospital owned by the consultant you need to see at the general hospital? In that his yeye hospital, he is the only one that has sense? He would have employed security men, part-time prostitutes and his driver to mask as nurses. Yes, I have seen it. I once had a friend in Shomolu who was jobless. Me and him will be sitting down at Folami street and be eating Agoyin beans, then one day, he started going to work. I wish him well.
Then one day, my sister took ill, and her office took her to one private hospital in Gbagada. Mbok, guess who was the nurse that came to ‘chook’ my sister injection? The mumu that was eating Agoyin beans with me o. I screamed and almost died. My people, my sister-in-law, says I should leave it to God, that God will fight and that it was ‘sheri’ that killed Mena through witchcraft. I cannot laugh in tears from this statement. The truth is that the government has to withdraw all licences in that sector and recertify them. The whole lot are just charlatans. Let them come and beat me. I am waiting—killers in white garments.
