THE COST OF GETTING SICK (FINALE)

Honestly, this health matter, "who no go no know". The crisis in Nigeria's university teaching hospitals did not appear overnight, and it certainly is not the result of some mysterious force beyond human control. It is the predictable outcome of years of neglect, weak accountability, mismanaged resources, and a political culture that often treats public healthcare as something meant for other people. Many of those with the power to fix the system rarely depend on it themselves. They board flights when they fall ill. Ordinary Nigerians wait in overcrowded wards and hope for the best.

The solutions are not complicated. They have been discussed for years. What has been missing is the determination to act on them.

Government must begin by funding healthcare as though lives actually depend on it, because they do. Nigeria committed itself to allocating 15 percent of its national budget to health through the Abuja Declaration more than two decades ago. Yet year after year, health spending remains far below that target. Budgets reveal priorities more honestly than speeches ever will.

Medical workers must also be given reasons to stay. It is difficult to ask doctors, nurses, pharmacists, and laboratory scientists to remain committed to a system that delays salaries, ignores working conditions, and offers little confidence about the future. The migration of healthcare professionals is often discussed as though it were a mystery. People go where they are valued, paid fairly, and equipped to do their jobs.

Corruption can no longer be treated as an unfortunate side issue. When procurement funds disappear, when patients are pushed toward private arrangements, or when unofficial payments become routine, real people suffer. These are not administrative inconveniences. They are abuses that weaken the entire system and should carry meaningful consequences.

Basic infection control deserves equal urgency. No patient should enter a hospital seeking treatment only to leave with an infection that could have been prevented through proper sanitation, sterilisation, and monitoring. Yet this remains a reality in far too many facilities. Sometimes the most devastating failures are not dramatic. They are ordinary lapses repeated every day.

The burden of healthcare costs on ordinary Nigerians must also be reduced. For millions of families, illness is not just a health crisis. It is a financial emergency. A single hospital admission can wipe out savings built over years. Expanding health insurance coverage is not merely a policy option. It is one of the few practical ways to stop sickness from becoming a pathway into poverty.

Teaching hospitals were envisioned as centres of excellence. Places where the country's brightest medical minds would train, research, innovate, and care for patients facing the most complex conditions. That vision still matters. But in too many cases, these institutions now stand as reminders of what happens when public systems are allowed to decay while everyone pretends the damage is temporary.

Patients know it. The healthcare workers who remain know it. Those who have left know exactly why they left.

The cost of getting sick in Nigeria has never been measured only in naira. It is measured in anxiety, delayed treatment, preventable complications, exhausted families, and opportunities lost. It is measured in the quiet calculations people make when deciding whether they can afford to seek care at all.

The question is no longer whether the system can be repaired. It can. The real question is whether those entrusted with that responsibility will find the courage and urgency to act before more hospitals lose not only resources and personnel, but something even harder to restore: public trust.