Nigerian Doctors Are Like A SIM Card
By Taiye Olaniyi
Since the advent of the use of mobile telephone, GSM, Nigerians, both highly and lowly placed have been engrossed in multiple usages of connecting all there is possible to connect using their GSM phones. Some have advanced to use of iPad, android and other similar stuff just linking up and down, left and right in all that modern communication gadgets can offer.
It is however heartening to note that one basic identifier without which an individual could not but use is the SIM card which is focal to all that is vocal about how the Information Technology using the internet has made possible.
Without the SIM card at least presently, many of our gadgets no matter how sophisticated would be as useless as a corpse of the highly placed person inside the best of the coffin.
A SIM card provides a platform for all applications that will converge and disperse messages of and in whatever form amongst all being connected.
Service providers of all fancies still refer to their uniqueness not only in their services but that in the originating point, the SIM card.
Medical Doctors are like that, SIM cards of all health institutions. Though other allied practitioners are equally very important and do not connote any iota of inferiority complex, yet the doctors by their extensive training, length of training, and huge financial investments involved constitute a story that cannot just be discarded like a pack of woods.
They are the SIM card and lifewire of hospital services and any individual and group of individuals that relegate the doctors are ready to lick his or her soup without salt or eat his pounded yam without pounding the yams.
Aside from those in high positions of authority, the very high political offices reserved for "Excellencies,"no other set of individuals is subject to "Oath" as doctors on graduation were made to pitch their professional humanitarian disposition to the Hippocratic "Oath." The "Oath" as it is is predicated on “Conscience in Godliness" but then not all those that swear to oaths live according to the dictates of their consciences.
Like Biblical Esau, the nobility of heart in true service to mankind through the portal of ideal medical practices can be jettisoned for burnt offerings and mundane financial return on previous financial and intellectual investments.
The Hippocratic "Oath" the real chip of the SIM which the doctors are made to adhere has become merely figurative than its humanitarian prerogative. Because many of our doctors think without them health services could be grounded, they sometimes get infatuated with behavior and misbehaviors too.
This is the seamy side of doctors in their professional practices, like SIM cards they overate their usefulness drowning in the strike today, strike tomorrow without exhibiting their God-given talents to save patients from their psychological woes and traumatizing health environment in Nigeria.
But then doctors as SIM cards are better than those who only germinate in their highly quarantined political estates trading with lives of citizens performing surgery and operation of corruption, cabalism, cartels and are cankerworm to the socio-economic and psychological survival of the average Nigerian citizen.
Nigerian doctors excel in professional performances in international best practices, politicians bring disgrace to us in all areas of human endeavors both home and abroad. Name one area that political practices have brought honour and respect to Nigeria or if any of our current politicians can sacrifice his or her life the way Dr. Amaeyo Stella Adadevoh did to save us from the Ebola virus.
It's only rice and beans we are made or conscripted to scramble for in 2024 preceding 2027 crusades for earthly power.
Now, doctors who previously trickled back to work with tattered hearts and battered images time and again after resolution of their labor issues, so will mere hanging of a stethoscope ward off Ebola " Covid-19 and now the threat of M-Pox pandemic that seems to have joined and worsened the catalogue of both the doctors' and citizens' woes. What becomes the fortune or misfortune of Nigeria in the crudety of governance these modern days of digital technology and "knowledge-based" economic management?
Think About It.
Today is yesterday's tomorrow, are we Nigerians moving forward in thoughts and conduct?"
Better we all do our best, lest we remain mere handsets without the magic of the SIM card.
Taiye Olaniyi, a retired postman writes from Lagos