By Alex Enumah
A senior lawyer and human 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 yesterday 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 were hoarding vaccines to the detriment of the poor countries, stressing that 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 five per cent of its budget to healthcare,” he said, adding 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 remained essentially an idea whose time is yet to come in Nigeria.
“Health is still not yet a budgetary priority in Nigeria. In a culture that is bereft of humanism, members of the political and economic elite are content with the situation in which they pay exorbitant fees in private hospitals at home and abroad. Here we are talking of less than 1% of the population. Policy makers are not losing their sleep because the 99% cannot afford quality healthcare.
“It is, therefore, shocking that with all the billons garnered by the private sector Coalition Against COVID-19 (CACOVID) last year, the federal and state governments are yet to report noticeable improvements in healthcare infrastructure. Not enough molecular laboratories have been built. Ventilators are not in adequate supply in hospitals and isolation centres”.
He lamented that even with all the warnings that the pitiable situations in India, Brazil and Turkey were presenting to the world, Nigeria was not getting prepared for the possibility of another virulent wave with massive production of medical oxygen and other essential materials to save lives.
