On Monday, the immediate past president of the World Medical Association (WMA), Dr Osahon Enabulele, said that Africa alone was short of 5.3 million out of the 10 million globally needed healthcare workers.
He said that all the Nigerian government needed to do to get its health sector working was to look into the previous suggestions and implement them rather than continuously calling for suggestions.
Enabulele, who made the remarks at the Benin Airport, where he was received after his successful tenure as the WMA president and handed over to the new leadership in Rwanda a few days ago, intoned that “What we have been preaching over time in terms of building resilient healthcare systems has now been accepted as a reality.
“That’s more important for us in Africa, where we have very fragile healthcare systems. Along with that is the issue of building a resilient health workforce. You cannot have a healthcare system that does not boast of the requisite number of healthcare workers.
“Africa today has a deficit of about 5.3 million healthcare workers to be in a serious position to attain universal health coverage. Globally, we need 10 million more workers, but out of this, 5.3 million workers are needed in Africa, so in light of the huge brain drain, we have more responsibility to ensure that our governments are taken into account to build more retentive mechanisms to ensure that our own healthcare workers, physicians and other health professionals stay in their countries rather than encouraging them to move because of the very indecent working conditions that we have.” He bemoaned.
He said that there was a need for African countries and governments to create an enabling working environment and competitive wages for medical workers to check healthcare workers’ migration from Africa.
For Nigeria, Enabulele said, “The Nigerian government does not need to reinvent the wheel; the solutions have since been there; all they need to do is to dust up the files and get on board those progressive solutions and advice that have been given to them a long time ago. I was a member of the 2014 national conference, and we also advanced progressive policies to transform not only the health system but the Nigerian state, but we have more often than not been an observance of these resolutions in the breach.”
He said his tenure as WMA president had proven that Africa had what it takes to be heard globally.
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