This may be regarded as another classic case of where the personal becomes the social. That Geneva based Sierra Leonean political economist, Dr. Yusuf Bangura, fell sick last Thursday (March 18th, 2021) is his private or personal matter, strictly speaking. Intervention understands that he was seized by extreme pain last Thursday and had to find himself in the hospital. But, that is where the personal could be said to end and the social took over.
Again, the information is that before you could say Bangura in hospital, the problem had been discovered. Scanning and other tests took care of that, followed by the surgery by Friday. By yesterday, (March 22nd, 2021) according to authoritative information available to Intervention, he had been discharged. It is even understood that he has himself expressed gratitude to “the doctors and nurses for their great job”.
What he said is similar to what a notable Nigerian activist said a decade ago after undergoing a complicated operation but which he did not know was going on as the doctor engaged him in a conversation during the laser process in the United Kingdom. At the end of the day, he said something like “this people have gone far”.
There will be critics of this comparison but all judgments still stand on comparison anyway. And we cannot fail to compare Bangura’s experience with Gani Fawehinmi’s case, for example. Again, it is understood that, by the time Gani got to the UK, the doctors there were talking of a terminal disease at an advanced stage in contrast to what their Nigerian counterparts were calling cough. If you leave the late Gani out of this, there is the well known story of the woman who was undergoing excruciating Chemotherapy in Nigeria even when she had absolutely no cancer. It was also somewhere in the UK she was told they could not find anything close to cancer in her. Pressed by some friends to sue the Nigerian doctors, she declined and, instead, organised a huge prayer session in place of a survival party.
Stories of such experiences are everywhere across Nigeria and the question is how do all these happen without almost anyone being punished?
There are many responses to that but what seems to be consensual is that the Nigerian doctor is his/her own in the field of practice. While his counterparts in the UK, in Geneva, the USA, China, Germany, Saudi Arabia, South Africa are relying a lot on the technological fix to medical practice, he is relying on his guts feelings and mental arithmetic of the human anatomy. As brilliant as many of them may be, they lack the basic technology to translate brilliance into outcomes. The limits of mental arithmetic in medical practice are the costly misdiagnosis and blunders we hear of.
The evidence is there in the records they break as soon as they go to where medical practice relies a lot on technology. Medicine is not Literature or culture where imagination is on the driving seat. Imagination is not absent in medical science but it must call technology to the help of confirmation. The Nigerian doctor has not got that advantage, whatever the oases in the ‘desert’.
Why do not the hospitals have the technology? Intervention’s ranking of the responses available is that the number one problem in that respect is this: the country itself has no overarching development strategy. Without that, the health delivery arrangement is episodic and disjointed – one giant hospital here, one dilapidated one there, both coexisting. As such, the commissioning ceremony is more important than what happens after. One hospital has nothing to do with the next within what can be called a system with its enforcers whom no practitioner can escape. The second problem is the lumpen orientation of political leadership, with particular reference to the quality of persons they make commissioners of Health, especially at the state level. Where a quality person is in charge as has almost consistently been the case in Lagos State, for example, the difference is always there. The last on the list is the degree of corruption. According to information available, this operates at two levels. The first level is where the money is simply and neatly stolen. The second is where a particular piece of technology was actually bought but either a 2nd World War version of it or it is the only one around and it is over-used too soon.
Why do Nigerian public officials opt for 2nd World War versions? It is the greed and miserable level of patriotism that allows someone to approach another national with the request to buy expired or overtaken models of a particular piece of technology for his or her own country. Two, it also comes from presidents who do not supervise or simply lack that ability. It is unlikely that a minister can do that under Lee Kuan Yew and get away with it. This is worse as no Nigerian leader ever came to power with his own ideologue. In Nigeria, the president finds himself in office and starts to look for materials to assemble, many of whom have nothing in common with him, ideologically speaking and who, therefore, fools the president with sycophancy while doing his or her own thing.
The overarching or sum point in all these is that the Nigerian State has no conceptual framework of the human being. The Constitution over-emphasises citizenship but a citizen is not necessarily a subject conceived as one deserving of pastoral care. The pastoral dimension of the state’s conception of subjectivity in the Western world is the secret of what Yusuf Bangura got. Although neoliberal in orientation or outlook, the pastoral care role of the state has been posed as a transition in history which tends to serve has served to counter balance the raw violence of power and the raw face of capitalism, especially in the West.
Thank God, we are only imagining Yusuf Bangura in Nigeria. In reality, he is far away. But he was here and could have still been here!
