Yusuf Olaniyonu, a veteran journalist and former Ogun State Commissioner for Information, early this year had an enlarged prostate challenge, which cannot be said to be life-threatening yet. This is because, by his own account, his condition had not reached the stage of nocturia, which is a typical symptom of enlarged prostate.
Novturia is a medical condition signposted by having to wake up frequently, sometimes up to seven or more times, to urinate in the night. But in his own case, he was not urinating more than two or three times in the night, which medical experts would consider normal for his age— 58.
However, he was seized by an uprush of fear of the unknown because his father had died of prostate cancer and owing to the fact that the ailment is said to be hereditary.
That drew him to, quite wisely, seek timely medical attention. That was the beginning of a circuitous experience that could have ended his life but for Providence and the support of solid people around him.
He literally passed through the proverbial valley of the shadow of death and lived to tell the story. He penned his riveting, grisly story, titled: ‘At 58, God has given me a second chance,’ published on his birthday, July30, chronicling near-death health challenges he went through from February 19, this year.
According to him, an urologist had recommended surgery as a solution to his enlarged prostate, so it would not affect his kidneys. He was until then hale and hearty. He, in fact, drove himself to the unnamed highbrow Abuja hospital for an “elective surgery” that was not to last for more than 30 minutes. It was a sort of surgery done abroad in minutes and the patient would return home as if he had just gone to ease himself.
However, Olaniyonu from the experience became a pitiable specimen of the decay and morass into which the nation’s health system has sunk. The first surgery developed complications after the surgeons had ruptured his bladder and wheeled him back to the ward.
He ended up going through six surgeries and three minor procedures within a spell of five months. He literally became a medical jelly at the Intensive Care Unit(ICU), surviving on oxygen and easing himself through catheters.
“I also became totally dependent on others for the performance of even such personal functions as cleaning myself,” the former commissioner recalled.
After a rigmarole, an impalpable medical circuit, which was bound to end nowhere but sure death, Olaniyonu, with the timely intervention of the former Senate President Bukola Saraki(Olaniyonu was his Special Adviser Media), had to be flown to Egypt where he spent the next two months at Neuro Espitalia. It was there he received the needed medical succour and corrective treatment that eventually revived him.
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The Egyptian hospital, the top notch journalist disclosed, was replete with stories of “Nigerians who come there to correct surgical operations that had been performed in Nigeria, some from glamorous hospitals in Abuja where they charge exorbitantly.”
However, if Olaniyonu was lucky to have lived to regale his macabre tale himself, Waheed Ayilara, then Akwa Ibom Commissioner of Police, did not have that grace. He had the same prostate enlargement problem with Olaniyonu. And like the former commissioner, he too walked into the hospital by himself for a surgery at the Lagos State University Teaching Hospital(l (LASUTH) but ended his journey in the morgue!
His shocking death, about six months after Olaniyonu’s ghoulish ordeal, was an exemplification of the insuperable tragedy that the nation’s health sector has become. It came with such a tinge of high drama that the Lagos State Government was impelled to order an immediate probe of the circumstances under which the surgical knife went awry for the top cop. The result is yet to be released or made public.
On Monday, August 26, 2024, three days to the surgery that sent Ayilara to the great beyond, the police chief did not look sick at all. His colleagues said he was his ebullient self during the pullout ceremony for Assistant-Inspector General of Police, Yetunde Longe.
He went for the surgery the following Wednesday, August 28. But what he did before entering the theatre was simply befuddling. As if he had a premonition of his death, after doning the green colour theatre wear, he was said to have requested the surgeons to spare him a few minutes during which he moved aside and observed ‘Nwafil Rakst’, a kind of voluntary Islamic prayer.
He went for the surgery the following Wednesday, August 28. But what he did before entering the theatre was simply befuddling. As if he had a premonition of his death, after doning the green colour theatre wear, he was said to have requested the surgeons to spare him a few minutes during which he moved aside and observed ‘Nwafil Rakst’, a kind of voluntary Islamic prayer.
He sought Allah’s forgiveness, and said he had forgiven those who might have also offended him. He told his people that he owed no one but that he promised to donate a cow to someone for a burial and his lawyer, a ticket fare from Abuja to Lagos. He concluded that, should the surgery lead to his death, NASFAT Mission Board should be called to take care of all his burial process. Ayilara, a devout Muslim who acted briefly as Lagos CP before he was posted to Akwa Ibom as substantive CP, did not survive the surgery as he had feared. He was buried the following day according to Islamic rites.
Olaniyonu’s ordeal and Ayilara’s death have come to expose the underbelly of a Nigerian health sector in big trouble. A sector in the ineluctable nadir of deterioration. A sector plagued by a gnawing contradiction: a pilloried sector literally pinioned at home by quakery, meagre pay, dearth of medical infrastructure/equipment and gob-smacked official insensitivity, on one hand; and a lustre whose personnel are poached abroad and who put up top notch stellar performances outside our shores, on the other!
The World Health Organization(WHO) recently identified Nigeria as one of the 55 countries with the most pressing health workforce needs. Indeed, the country is grappling with a severe health manpower deficiency that places it as the third largest country with absolute shortage of health workers in the world.
Nigeria’s current doctors-to-patients ratio of four to 10,000 falls far below the WHO standard of one to 600. Whereas, the United States of America’s (USA’s) ratio is 26 to 10,000 and 28 in the United Kingdom.
It is estimated that at least 2,000 medical doctors leave Nigeria yearly and no fewer than 5,407 Nigerian trained doctors are currently working with the British National Health Service(NHS) in UK. And over 5,000 medical personnel— physicians, dentists, nurses and other health professionals of Nigerian descent— are also in US health workforce.
Nigeria’s current doctors-to-patients ratio of four to 10,000 falls far below the WHO standard of one to 600. Whereas, the United States of America’s (USA’s) ratio is 26 to 10,000 and 28 in the United Kingdom.
It is estimated that at least 2,000 medical doctors leave Nigeria yearly and no fewer than 5,407 Nigerian trained doctors are currently working with the British National Health Service(NHS) in UK. And over 5,000 medical personnel— physicians, dentists, nurses and other health professionals of Nigerian descent— are also in US health workforce.
According to the President of the Nigerian Medical Association (NMA), Dr. Francis Faduyile, over 33,000 out of the 75,000 Nigerian medical doctors who registered with NMA have left the country for greener pastures. Countries like US, UK, Canada, Saudi Arabia, Australia, among others, have continued to poach the best of our medical professionals, leaving the country bedraggled and prostrate.
The immediate fallout of this consistent ‘heist’ of our medical workforce is the depletion of our hospitals of the quintessence of expertise and the consequential medical ‘theatre accidents’ like those concerning Olaniyonu and Ayilara.
Nigeria’s health sector is sick and urgently requires no less than a declaration of an emergency to revivify it.
