Who is watering the Nigerian grass?

By Bello Hussein Adoto

A few days after someone glibly told me that the grass was greener in Nigeria, a young medical doctor Dr Diaso Vwaere was crushed to death in an elevator accident at the General Hospital in Odan, Lagos State.

Netizens and other persons who have worked at the hospital said they complained about the malfunctioning elevator for years, but the management did nothing tangible to address it. So the young female doctor, with two weeks to complete her housemanship, took the elevator to retrieve a dispatch—a food package—on the ground floor. She never made it.

I imagine her in the elevator anticipating the food she ordered, salivating, getting ready to devour her food, and returning to her busy schedule as a house officer. I imagine her standing on the elevator, weightless, as it moves.

Then it snapped. Suddenly, the metal box is crashing down from the 10th floor all the way to the ground. Imagine her now in the elevator, weightless, as it falls freely. Imagine her grasp at everything and anything, something to break her fall. Then, bam, it crashed. Imagine her now.

What do you think she would have felt? She was trapped in the rubble. The package she was going to retrieve was less of a worry. Her call can wait. The world can wait. Now, she needed freedom, a way out of the rubble. She needed air. The wreckage is choking.

While in the rubble, time trickled. Seconds must have felt like a decade, minutes like forever. Time trickled. One, two, three… 40 minutes. She was there for 40 minutes before help came. She was out, finally. Ahhh, some relief.

Anyone could have been in that elevator. It could have been a patient, doctor, nurse, relative, or even you, my reader. It could have been a visitor, like the state governor or the CMD. Would this incident have made any difference? I wonder.

A consultant once said it’s better to have a heart attack on the streets of London than in the corridors of a teaching hospital in Nigeria, and I thought that was ridiculous. From what I have seen in recent times, he was not wrong. It is not impossible. We are all at our own’s risk.

Those who should provide the basic oversight at the hospital, from government officials to the hospital management and staff, seem to have other businesses than their jobs. That’s why the elevator could be so bad as to take a life before they consider fixing it. Do we need the president, governor, or minister of health to come and fix it too? What happened to the hospital management?

The elevator accident happened at a hospital big enough to have house officers, ten floors, and elevators. It is a big hospital, indeed, by every standard. Yet there was no blood to rescue Dr Diaso. Some said there was no morphine, emergency supplies, or cotton wool. The last part could have been a stretch, but I have seen resident doctors protest that there was no normal saline, which should be as common as sachet water. Yet…

When patients come to hospitals, and these supplies are not available, and they cannot afford them, they turn on the doctors and nurses that are equally helpless. A soldier beat my friend’s wife, a nurse at Sobi Specialist Hospital, some time ago because she asked him to get delivery packs for his wife’s delivery. Last December, patient relatives at the University of Ilorin Teaching Hospital pinned a doctor to the wall. They beat him because they thought their father was dying and he wasn’t helping. Meanwhile, they were asked to do a test they had yet to do.

These incidents happened in tertiary hospitals where we should expect—sorry, hope—that things are better, where supplies were available for patients to use and pay later. But they aren’t. What is the hope of someone in a rural area?

I wonder what would happen if someone fell off a storey building in Obehira, where I grew up, or Ikuehi, my hometown. What would be their fates? They may have to be referred to the recently built Reference Hospital in Okene. Will they fare any better there?

Back to Dr Diaso, the doctor in the elevator accident. She survived the crash but not the injuries she sustained. She was severely injured and needed blood. “There was no blood available for resuscitation,” wrote the Lagos branch of the Nigerian Medical Association. There she was in the hospital. She had spent 11 months and two weeks on calls, attending to patients, saving lives, unable to be resuscitated because there was no blood. She died. She died in the institution where she served.

They say the grass is greener here. Who is watering the grass?

Bello Hussein sent this piece via bellohussein210@gmail.com.