Patients, Doctors, And Patriotic Death
By Taiye Olaniyi
When patients are yoked by ailments and diseases, the burden of what to pay for being sick kills more than ailing health. The hospital environment itself is more frightening than soothing to one's helplessness.
Seeing the doctor is another compound burden for a doctor overstretched, one so overstressed that the Hippocratic Oath becomes abandoned.
Who then is to blame between hopeless patients and helpless doctors? Sometimes one may be tempted to blame the stock of individuals who appropriate or/ misappropriate the funds that should service the patients, doctors, and hospitals that market their hopelessness and helplessness. Fortunes that many of such stock of promise makers but promise breakers carry to America, India, or Germany on health matters not only divert capital flight but build the impression that nothing good can come out of Nigerian health personnel in our " Obodo" Nigeria apology to Waka About of Weekend Times days.
When they travel out with plenty of money even for the tiniest of health matters, thousands die at home because health facilities, doctors, and allies can no longer cope with a growing number of health-failing citizens whose spinal columns could no longer stand them to clarion call in patriotism. Patriotism seems dying if not dead in patients and health practitioners in Nigeria. There is now the impression that heaven or may I say hell and its inferno could fall on us all. That is the stalemate and stage health matters have reached in Nigeria thus leading Sawyer of Liberia to teach us the greatest lessons in History that only the thinking people get liberated and not those sinking in politics and corruption.
So, Sawyer an American -Liberian of West African extraction had come and gone carting away our own Ameyo Stella Adadevoh and other patriots. But the question is, should innocent Nigerians always die of avoidable deaths?
Nigerians are today in a mourning mood and lamenting in fear of who the next death would conscript to life beyond. In our hearts, the flag of our survival is flown at half-mast not minding that the nation may sometimes at public places be full-blown.
Who will live to blow the bugle now that true patriots have died, patients are dying, doctors strike with or without wits at the spur of the moment while politicians are already trooping nooks and crannies since their holiday prayer has dropped in the largess of another perquisite to the legislators whether or not the other citizens "Breath."
Think, Nigerians think for the survival of this beloved nation Nigeria lies squarely on volunteering to think Good, Speak, and Act Good in all ramifications and in all that we are privileged to be.
Oliver Goldsmith once admonished that:
" You can Preach a Better Sermon with Your Life than with Your Lips."
Taiye Olaniyi, a retired Postman of the Nigeria Postal Service, is based in Lagos