By Our Reporter
The Kwara State Governor, Abdulrahman Abdulrazaq may have already started to return the health sector to a perilous state with his moves to revive some of the infrastructure and policies of past government in 1999.
This action is coming on the heels of concern that pregnant women and young children are being forced to seek medical care in some of the re-commissioned health structures which is capable of returning the state to an era of the highest death rate in the country under the present All Progressives Congress (APC) administration.
From 1999 to 2003, Kwara State had the second worst mortality rate in Nigeria which was attributed to the poorly designed death-trap clinics rushed out by the then ruling administration shortly before the commencement of the first term tenure of Dr Bukola Saraki.
During his administration, Saraki had established a strongly tiered health system, to embed affordable high quality care with prompt referrals and health insurance within its pioneer status in the nation as the first state to offer universal health coverage and community health insurance throughout the state.
The action followed the visitation by a team of experts from Apollo Hospitals in India who came to Kwara in 2003 to assess all health facilities, and recommended that the existing structures for primary health care were fatally flawed, not fit for purpose and should be scrapped, an advice that was carefully implemented.
Apollo Hospitals is the world leading multispecialty health care unit with best in class treatments for various disease and health management.
Following the submission of the Apollo team, the facilities were locked up and some were repurposed to nonmedical use which the Kwara state government is now trying to revive with all the attendant health risk associated with it.
However, there has been no shortage of excellent facilities in the state available for the government to use.
In every local government area in Kwara State, the Saraki administration comprehensively renovated 6 large-capacity General Hospitals across all districts, and the states tertiary facilities are the envy of the 19 northern states including the Kwara Advanced Diagnostic Centre renamed Harmony Advanced Diagnostic Centre, completed in 2010, which in a visionary strategy at that time, already had the PCR Molecular Testing Equipment in use today by the National Centre for Disease Control (NCDC) for testing populace for COVID-19.
The present move of the government believed to be a political gimmick to seek popularity is capable of sending women and children in the state to preventable deaths in 2020.
It is a well known fact that the most advanced public primary health centre and facility in the state and even Nigeria, is the million-dollar state of the art Maternity and Child Centre at Eruku, Ekiti local government area which was formerly a cottage hospital. It was constructed from the ground up, fully- staffed and equipped with modern equipment and instruments and donated to the state in April 2015, by some oil companies working in a philanthropic effort with former First Lady, Mrs Toyin Saraki.
A simple visit to the facility will transport any patient to the 21st Century Medicine, while the old cottage hospital still on grounds which is out of place by comparison.
But after the facility was passed to the full management of the Kwara State government in November 2019 after a 5-year training of its Kwara staff, stakeholders have expressed grave concerns about the lack of political will and competence in the State governor’s Cabinet, to maintain such a valuable medical facility properly.
The Kwara State Commissioner for Health, Dr Raji Razaki did not answer several calls seeking for clarification on the matter. He also did not reply text message sent on the issue.
