Abuja, 08 May, 2024 / 8:48 pm (ACI Africa).
The health sector in the West African nation of Nigeria has been subjected to many years of “neglect”, Archbishop Ignatius Ayau Kaigama of the country’s Catholic Archdiocese of Abuja has lamented, and faulted the government for not doing much to address human capital flight of medical doctors.
In his homily during a Thanksgiving Mass that Knights of St. John International (KSJI) organized in honor of the Secretary to the Government of the Federation, Senator George Akume, Archbishop Kaigama called upon the Bola Ahmed Tinubu-led government to work towards having Nigerians practising medicine abroad return home.
“When I go to the UK, to the US, in every place I visit, I see Nigerian doctors; I see Nigerian engineers, professors, in all places,” he said, and added, “Somebody told me that if the Nigerian doctors in the UK were to all come back home, their health system would collapse.”
The Nigerian Catholic Archbishop lamented, “Despite all the professional doctors we have across the world our local health system is very poor; nobody wants to take their patients to Nigerian hospitals because of years of neglect by the government.”
“Those who are rich will always fly to the United States or the United Kingdom where they can get better treatments while the poor are left to suffer on account of the poor health system,” he said during the Eucharistic celebration at the Catholic Secretariat Chaplaincy.
