Contradictions in the Nigerian health care system have taken another turn as Saudi Arabia is currently recruiting doctors in Abuja.
Venue is Sheraton Hotels and Towers, a neighbourhood of the Federal Ministry of Health and the national government seat, Aso Rock.
Many of the doctors could be seen with jackets of their credentials, applying for jobs the way menial and other job seekers do.
This is happening after thousands of them have migrated abroad, with many of them holding the pillars of hospitals in the likes on the United Kingdom, USA and Canada.
It is also happening at a time resident doctors are on strike, as many of them are being owed salaries and allowances, most of which are naturally paltry.
The open recruitment, where the doctors are anxiously praying to their destinies to help them secure appointments so that they can jet out, taking brain drain to an alarming height with government not showing any reasonable and honest concern, is also happening at a time coronavirus is back with the Deltan wave is fierce that it has killed hundreds within weeks.
Analysts will also situate the development within the context of the Buhari presidency that promised to fix the health situation but where the President himself subsists on London treatment, though his aides say this is based on his medical history of some 40 years.
Yet, critics and other concerned Nigerians dreadfully remember that Nigerian hospitals are not only poorly equipped, poorly managed, poorly funded and poorly manned, but even one of them as strategic as the Aso Rock Clinic dalso oes not receive monies budgeted to it – in practical and conscientious sense.
The First Lady, Aisha Buhari, had, not too long ago, cried out that it was more or less an empty shell despite all budgetary allocations.
In many of the developed and serious-minded countries, like the Saudi Arabia that is currently recruiting in Abuja, good remuneration and conducive atmosphere are guaranteed, unlike what obtains in Nigeria.
This is a familiar reason that some of the doctors canvass, with some saying that a doctor’s total pay in a Dubai or Saudi can be up to what is budgeted for a Nigerian General Hospital monthly, which it may not even get into its pocket.
