toddler in the arms of its President-Founder and Devex Global ‘health-for-all’ champion, H. E. Toyin Ojora Saraki, then the First Lady of a newly elected civil administration in Kwara State, one of the poorest states in Nigeria. Since then, it seems to the casual onlooker that there are certain aberrations that have become enshrined in our normative belief system, and that is the normalization of preventable deaths.
In his address on Wednesday, September 16, 2020, Nigeria’s president Muhammadu Buhari spoke about the resilience of the Nigerian, his/her “welcoming spirit, love as well as the abundant wealth inherent in our human capital…All these properties make us unarguably the most prosperous black nation in the world and Africa’s largest economy”.
The health system comprises of everything and everyone involved in delivering health services. The people, the equipment, products, consumables, the environment – communication systems, information systems, technology systems, quality assurance and improvement strategies, governance and legislation. In sixty years, Nigeria has not leveraged on what has been put in place globally to strengthen its health system.
How do we change the narrative in Nigeria? It is unbelievable that nearly three decades after the launch of the National Health Insurance Scheme, we are where we are with out-of-pocket health expenditure. The Alma-Ata Declaration that was patterned after the ‘barefoot doctors’ in China to leverage on key principles of appropriate technology, community involvement and common endemic morbidities to build a health system from the grassroots up, is now 42 years old.