The recent alarm by chief medical directors (CMDs) of university teaching hospitals and federal medical centres (FMCs) about the exodus of doctors, nurses and other skilled health workers from tertiary health institutions in Nigeria gives cause for concern. According to the CMDs, the doctors’ action is as a result of poor remuneration. They warned that if the trend was not halted, our hospitals would be empty in two years.
Speaking recently at the 2025 budget defence session before the House of Representatives Committee on Health Institutions, the CMD of the Lagos University Teaching Hospital (LUTH), Professor Wasiu Adeyemo, added that people resign, not even retire, almost every day. “In the next one or two years, we are going to have all our hospitals empty.
We need to do something about the remuneration of all the health care workers. Otherwise, government is putting a lot of money into infrastructure, and we are going to have empty hospitals. The major reason why people leave is for economic reasons. Consultants are earning less than $1,000,” Adeyemo said. The CMD of the University College Hospital (UCH), Ibadan, Professor Jesse Abiodun, lamented the delay in the release of budgeted funds to his hospital. This, he noted, adversely affected the operations of the hospital.
Even before the lamentation of the CMDs, the Coordinating Minister of Health and Social Welfare, Professor Mohammed Ali Pate, had noted that only about 55,000 licensed doctors, out of about 90,000 registered Nigerian doctors, attended to Nigerians as a result of the mass exodus of health professionals to hospitals abroad. According to the minister, in the last five years, Nigeria lost between 15,000 and 16,000 doctors to foreign hospitals.
The Medical and Dental Consultants Association of Nigeria (MDCAN) similarly lamented that only 6,000 consultants were remaining in Nigeria, as of February 2024. In a recent National Executive Council (NEC) meeting of the association in Ilorin, Kwara State, its president, Prof. Muhammad Mohammad, said data showed that about 1,300 left Nigeria in the last five years. The number of consultants, he regretted, would continue to dwindle as the retirement age for medical consultants is 60 years. In the next five years, according to Mohammad, about 1,700 consultants who are above 55 years will retire. The country reportedly produces about one or two consultants per annum. This number is too insignificant compared to the number of consultants that leave the country.
In 2022, the then Oyo State Chairman of the Nigerian Medical Association (NMA), Dr. Ayotunde Fasunla, similarly raised the alarm on the exodus of medical personnel from Nigeria, saying the country might be made to import medical doctors to treat local patients in future.
The immediate past Oyo State Commissioner for Health, Dr. Taiwo Ladipo, corroborated Fasunla. According to him, his state recruited 530 medical and health personnel within one year, but 20 of them, including 12 consultants, left the services of the state government. According to statistics, over 4,000 Nigerian doctors practise in the United States of America. Thousands of others are in the United Kingdom, Canada, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, among others.
This is why the doctor-patient ratio in Nigeria is about 1:5,000 as against the 1:600 recommended by the World Health Organisation (WHO). And this is also why many wealthy people don’t have trust in Nigeria’s health care system. They travel abroad to treat minor ailments, costing the country an average of $1 billion every year.
To worsen matters, doctors frequently go on strike to press home their demands for better welfare. Part of the demands of resident doctors, for instance, is a 200 per cent increase in their gross salary. The doctors feel that they deserve this increase considering the dwindling economic situation in the country, including the low value of the naira and its damaging effects on the cost of living in the country. They also wish to be paid all salary arrears owed them in 2014, 2015 and 2016 and immediate massive recruitment of clinical staff in the hospitals. Government has not heeded to most of their demands. Ironically, the same government, last year, increased the salary of judicial officers by 300 per cent.
Obviously, Nigerian health workers lack motivation. What they receive as salary is not comparable to what they are paid abroad. The Federal Government should take concrete actions to increase their salaries and equip our hospitals. This will help in no small way to halt medical tourism.
Health budget is too low and deserves to be increased. At least, let the government try to meet up with the agreement by African countries in Abuja in 2001 to allocate 15 per cent of each country’s annual budget to the health sector. Government should also increase the retirement age for consultants and other health workers so as to close the gap created by the migration syndrome.