Opinion

Still on Government neglect of our hospitals…

Published

3 weeks ago

September 28, 2026

By Bolanle BOLAWOLE,

Few days ago, a senior pastor of mine called and spoke fata-fata, as they say, about the state of our hospitals. His preambles were something else; it went something like this: Pastor Bolawole, I know you journalists are part of the problems of this country! You don’t tell our leaders the truth.

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Is it because of the brown envelopes you collect from them? That is why you are in cahoots with them.” I had started wondering what was the matter before he hit the nail on the head: Someone dear to him was ill and they needed him or her (I can’t remember which one) to undergo MRI scanning but no MRI machine was available “in the whole of Ogun state”, he said.

Eventually, they had to hire a vehicle for N50,000:00 to convey the sick person to the Redeemed Christian Church of God (RCCG) medical facility at the Redemption City (formerly Redemption Camp) along the Lagos-Ibadan Expressway, Mowe, for the MRI to be done. “And they will say Redeemed (RCCG) is not doing anything!” As I made to speak, he rounded up with “I just felt I should let you know about this” and hung up.

Not a single MRI machine in the whole of Ogun state? It appears unbelievable. But come to think about it, is Redemption City, where they eventually found one, not in Ogun state? Syllogism, which I learnt in Philosophy 101, taught at the then University of Ife (now Obafemi Awolowo University), Ile-Ife, by Dr. Dipo Fashina (aka Jingo), as he then was, is instructive here. According to Google, a syllogism is a form of logical reasoning that uses deductive logic to combine two statements and arrive at a new conclusion.

A standard syllogism has three parts: The first part is the major premise, which is a general statement or rule that is assumed to be true. The second part is a minor premise, specific fact or case that relates to the major premise. The third part is the conclusion, which is the logical result that follows from the two premises.

A classic example is: All humans are mortal/Socrates is a human/Therefore, Socrates is mortal. Another example is: All mammals are warm-blooded/All dogs are mammals/Therefore, all dogs are warm-blooded.” Arising from the above, we can construct our own syllogism thus: Redemption City is in Ogun state/MRI machine was found at Redemption City/Therefore, there is an MRI machine in Ogun state! QED!

The curiosity of a journalist still pushed me to ask questions about MRI machines. What exactly are they and their use? I got the following answer: “An MRI machine is a medical imaging device that uses powerful magnets and radio waves to create highly detailed, cross-sectional pictures of the inside of the body.

Healthcare providers use MRI scans to evaluate, diagnose, and monitor a wide variety of medical conditions without using harmful radiation. It is especially effective for viewing soft tissues.

Common uses include examining the brain and spinal cord; diagnosing strokes, multiple sclerosis (MS), brain tumors, aneurysms, and spinal cord injuries.

It is also useful in detecting “tears in ligaments, tendons, and cartilage (such as in the knee or shoulder), as well as bone infections, evaluating heart damage from heart attacks, congenital heart disease, heart structure, and blood flow abnormalities. MRI machines are also used in checking organs in the chest, abdomen, and pelvis—including the liver, kidneys, pancreas, prostate, and uterus—for tumors, inflammation, or disease.

Waooh! If MRI machines are this useful; nay, indispensable, how come they are not commonplace in our hospitals? Are their costs prohibitive? I got the following response: “New clinical MRI machines typically cost between $1 million and $3 million while advanced 7T research systems can reach $7 million. Purchase Price Breakdown: New Systems: A standard 1.5T or 3T MRI scanner costs $900,000 to over $3.7 million for the hardware alone. Refurbished or Pre-Owned Systems: Used or refurbished units range from $100,000 to $700,000, depending on field strength (Tesla rating), bore size, and condition. Budget/Low-Field Open MRIs: Basic or low-field models (0.25T–0.5T) cost between $130,000 and $300,000.

Additional Ownership and Operating Expenses: The sticker price is only part of the investment; total cost of ownership involves heavy infrastructure and maintenance outlays: Installation and Site Preparation: Specialized room construction, radiofrequency (RF) shielding, cryogen venting, and structural reinforcement typically add $75,000 or more.

Maintenance and Cooling: Annual service contracts and maintenance range from $10,000 to $100,000 per year, driven heavily by liquid helium consumption used to keep superconducting magnets cold (though newer low-helium or helium-free technologies are emerging).

These are not costs that even a local government cannot afford in today’s Nigeria, especially with the quantum of money the Bola Ahmed Tinubu administration is heaping on the two tiers of government – state and local governments. But to make assurance doubly sure, as they say, I asked Google if it has any information on the availability of MRI machines in Ogun state. This is the answer I got: “Yes, an advanced MRI machine is available in Ogun state at the private specialist facility – Redeemer’s Health Village located in Redemption City, Mowe.”

It goes further to say: “Redeemer’s Health Village (RHV) houses a 1.5 Tesla MRI system featuring a wide 70 cm bore capable of accommodating plus-sized patients weighing over 300 kg. They also offer subsidized scan slots for low-income and indigent patients.” Thumbs up for RCCG, but thumbs down for Ogun state because “major public healthcare facilities in the state – such as the Olabisi Onabanjo University Teaching Hospital (OOUTH) in Sagamu and the State Hospital in Ijaiye have lacked functional on-site MRI equipment, with the State House of Assembly actively pushing for their procurement.”

It is common knowledge that our leaders at all levels devote scanty attention to the state of our hospitals, primarily because they don’t patronize them. They always fly abroad for medical treatment – and can also afford the charges in the best private hospitals available locally.

These days, we are inundated with stories of “lack of bed space” in virtually all our hospitals. The father of one of my choriters spent hours on his wife’s wrapper spread on the bare floor along the corridors of LUTH before he was attended to because there was no bed space. He died. My panel-beater’s 14-year-old girl was rejected in one government hospital after another because of lack of bed space. She died.

The unprofessional conduct of health workers is another worrisome experience that anyone unfortunate enough to approach government hospitals have had to tell ad nauseam, ad infinitum.

My treasured niece, Abosede Oluwayemi Edema, aged 54, died last June at the Federal Medical Centre, Ebute-Metta, Lagos after being left unattended from 2.00am until she fell into a coma at 4.00pm. Her blood infection, which should not have killed her if she had been adequately and promptly attended to, was left untreated till she died. Doctors’ negligence, nonchalance, unprofessional conduct, and the complicity and duplicity of her husband, sent her to an untimely grave. We can go on and on!

One story that made headline news last week was the death of one Mr. Olatunde John Kolawole, which reportedly occurred at the Lagos State Teaching Hospital (LASUTH), Ikeja. Kolawole had an accident while trying to avoid an errant tricycle rider; he promptly got to the hospital but reportedly was left unattended for many hours that eventually proved fatal.

One of the dead man’s siblings had this to say: “Your death was not just an accident… It was a failure of duty. The people sworn to protect life let you slip away. An accident didn’t kill you, but (the) negligence of LASUTH (did).”

I could feel her pain because I have been through that valley lately. It was not the cancer that my niece, Bose, bravely fought that eventually killed her; the concoctions applied on her by her husband and his family, caused the blood infection that took her to the hospital. The nonchalance of doctors at the FMC, Ebute-Metta, was the last straw that broke the camel’s back.

Issues arising from these incidents include the dearth of qualified and experienced health workers in our medical facilities. JAPA has turned our hospitals into a ghost of their former selves – and our governments appear to be doing nothing about it. They don’t patronise our hospitals anyway.

The remaining medical personnel are criminally over-worked and stretched beyond elasticity level; with many collapsing and dying on duty. Little wonder, then, that they have become somewhat nonchalant and cavalier while on duty. “Do your best and take a rest or leave the rest” now appears the mantra. In addition to shortage of hands, available facilities have not grown in tandem with population explosion, leaving gaps that cannot be filled overnight.

Factor in the widespread corruption cankerworm and you begin to see how deplorable, to say the least, the situation has become in our hospitals.

There also is the question of the free rein given to Okada and Keke riders in many South-west states.

It was the mercy of God that saved my family from mourning two years back when an Okada rider suddenly made a u-turn into the lane of my son’s power bike. All they need to hear is a shout of “okada”! Pronto, they stop! They turn! Anything! Something has got to be done about these pests.

But until citizens become more proactive and begin to hold the feet of our leaders to the fire, nothing will change. Fela said it all in his song, “Suffering and Smiling”: For as long as we keep smiling back at them, they won’t see our pains; but the moment we begin to bare our fangs, they will feel our pains – and act appropriately!

PHCH’s hideous tariff hike

I read somewhere recently that the Government said it preferred that consumers be metered than for PHCN to hike tariffs.

Either the government is not aware of what is happening in the power section or it is duplicitous and complicit. PHCH has silently been adjusting its tariff without any commensurate improvement in service delivery. I got to know this – and with empirical evidence – last week when I recharged. I usually do this on a yearly basis. PHCN surreptitiously reviews tariff upward and or upgrade end-users from a lower-paying to a higher-paying Band without notice. On September 22nd, 2025, I bought 1488.8 KWh for N50,000.00 (Fifty Thousand Naira) only.

One year after, specifically on September 16, 2026, the same N50,000.00 (Fifth Thousand Naira) could only fetch me 1015.5 KWh, a loss of 473.3 KWh! A whopping 46.61% increase within a space of one year without any commensurate improvement in services provided! Tell me, where are we going in this country?

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When the government flaunts parameters and economic indices indicating that things are looking up, but citizens counter that their life isn’t improving, it is because of hidden and hideous costs such as PHCN’s that is not allowing the common man to enjoy the fruits of government’s efforts at revamping the economy. Must we fold our arms and look – and suffer in silence?

(Published in the ON THE LORD’S DAY column in the Sunday Tribune newspaper edition of Sunday, 27 September, 2026).

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Opinion

Tegbe’s 24-Hour Energy Zones and the Shift From Megawatts to Money

Published

2 weeks ago

October 2, 2026

Mariam Balogun

By Sufuyan Ojeifo,

There is a point at which a country’s electricity problem ceases to be merely an electricity problem. It becomes a problem of economic geography.

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Where can factories operate with confidence? Where can businesses plan beyond the next appearance of a generator? Where can hospitals, schools, technology companies, markets and households begin to organise their lives around the reasonable expectation that electricity will be there?

This is the thinking behind the latest initiative from the Minister of Power, Joseph Tegbe, to develop what the Federal Government calls Energy Zones – defined corridors where homes, businesses and industries could receive stable, 24-hour electricity.

The proposed zones cover the Lagos axis, the Abuja-Kaduna-Kano corridor and the Enugu-Port Harcourt corridor. Tegbe’s latest move is a meeting with selected electricity distribution companies to begin working through what it would take to make the idea real.

At first glance, it sounds like another promise of uninterrupted electricity in a country that has heard too many such promises. However, there is something more consequential in the architecture of the proposal.

Tegbe is asking Nigerians to look at the power problem differently.

For years, the national conversation has been dominated by generation. How many megawatts are being produced? How much can the transmission grid carry? How many generating plants are working? These are important questions. But electricity does not become useful simply because it has been generated.

It must travel. It must be received. It must be distributed. And ultimately, somebody must be able to use it. That last part has often been treated as the end of the conversation when, in reality, it is where the economic value of electricity begins.

Tegbe has put the point plainly. The constraint is not limited to generation and transmission; it also includes how much electricity can be taken up and delivered at the distribution end.

The proposed Energy Zones are intended to address precisely that gap while improving commercial demand and the revenue performance of the distribution companies.

There is an important idea here.

Nigeria does not necessarily have to wait for every weakness in the electricity value chain to be solved simultaneously before beginning to create pockets of reliability.

A country of more than 200 million people, with enormous differences in industrial activity, population density and commercial demand, may have to proceed through carefully selected economic corridors while the wider system is repaired.

This is not an argument for abandoning the national grid. It is an argument for making the grid more economically purposeful.

The three corridors selected by the Ministry are revealing. Lagos and its adjoining industrial axis represent perhaps the country’s most concentrated commercial and industrial demand.

The Abuja-Kaduna-Kano corridor connects the political capital with major commercial and industrial centres in the North. Enugu-Port Harcourt links important commercial, manufacturing and energy-producing communities in the South-East and South-South.

These are not simply lines on a power map. They are lines on Nigeria’s economic map. That distinction matters.

For too long, Nigerians have experienced electricity largely as a household inconvenience. The light goes off. The generator comes on. A business buys diesel. A manufacturer factors self-generation into production costs. A hospital makes contingency arrangements.

A young entrepreneur learns, often painfully, that the real price of electricity is not what appears on the bill but what it costs to keep the business alive when the supply fails.

A reliable electricity corridor changes that equation.

If a factory knows that a particular industrial cluster has dependable power, investment decisions begin to change.

If a commercial district can plan around predictable electricity, operating costs become easier to manage.

If businesses can depend on supply for most of the day, generators can move from being the first line of defence to being what they were always supposed to be: backup.

This is where Tegbe’s technocratic instincts may prove significant.

His background is not that of a career power-sector operator. His professional experience has largely been in consulting, fiscal and economic reform, institutional transformation and advisory work. That background has been visible in his early approach to the ministry – diagnosis, audits, financial questions, infrastructure bottlenecks, and attempts to identify where one part of the system is preventing another from functioning properly.

His Energy Zones proposal fits that pattern. It treats the electricity market less as a single machine waiting for one dramatic repair and more as a system of interconnected constraints that can be isolated, diagnosed and addressed.

Tegbe had already identified the three corridors as priorities for grid stabilisation, with technical audits intended to establish the condition of critical infrastructure. The latest engagement with DisCos suggests that the idea is now moving beyond technical diagnosis towards the more difficult question of how distribution will work within those corridors.

That is where the hard work begins.

A 24-hour power zone cannot be created by a press statement. It requires generation that is available when needed, transmission capacity that can carry it, distribution infrastructure capable of receiving it, transformers and feeders that can withstand the load, metering that properly captures consumption, customers willing and able to pay, and a commercial structure in which the various participants have an incentive to keep the system working.

It also requires protection. Vandalism and energy theft do not respect administrative boundaries. Neither do faulty equipment, unpaid bills or poor collection practices. Tegbe himself has acknowledged that the sector’s problems reinforce one another. Weak collections affect the market. Market weakness affects maintenance and gas payments. Unreliable supply in turn depresses collections.

This is why the Energy Zone experiment, if it is to succeed, must be judged by more than the number of hours electricity is available.

The real test will be whether reliability begins to produce economic consequences. Does industrial output increase? Do businesses spend less on self-generation? Does investment respond? Do DisCos collect more because customers are receiving a service they can trust? Does the government recover enough value from improved commercial activity to justify further infrastructure investment?

Those are the questions that should eventually accompany the glossy language of 24-hour power.

And there is another question that Tegbe and the Federal Government will have to confront: what happens outside the zones?

Nigeria cannot become a collection of electrically privileged corridors surrounded by communities waiting indefinitely for their turn.

The logic of concentrating investment in high-demand areas can be defended economically, especially if the resulting commercial activity strengthens the wider electricity market.

But the strategy will ultimately have to demonstrate how successful zones become stepping stones towards broader reliability.

That is the difference between an experiment and a system.

There is also a danger in admiring the architecture of reform from the comfort of an office.

It has to be said here that the statement issued by the minister’s media aide was long on ambition and conspicuously short on the details that matter. No timeline. No capacity targets. No specific investment figures. It is the kind of announcement that has, historically, been the precursor to nothing at all.

So Nigerians should watch the idea with interest, but also with the healthy scepticism that comes from decades of promises about electricity.

The minister deserves a measure of credit for at least diagnosing an important part of the illness.

For once, the conversation has shifted from the head to the feet – from generation to distribution, from megawatts to money.

At the same time, the Nigerian people have been given blueprints before. They have learned to admire the drawings while the building crumbles.

The Energy Zones remain a proposal. The government has not yet announced the detailed capacity requirements, implementation timetable or precise infrastructure investments that would make 24-hour supply possible.

That is not necessarily a fatal flaw. It may simply mean the idea is still being worked out.

But it does mean that the language of 24-hour power should be treated as an aspiration until it is matched by the machinery of implementation.

Yet the proposal deserves attention because it reflects a potentially important shift in the way the power problem is being conceived.

Nigeria may not fix its electricity crisis in one heroic sweep. It may have to build reliability corridor by corridor, demand centre by demand centre, and economic cluster by economic cluster.

There is nothing inherently glamorous about such work. It is engineering, finance, regulation, distribution and relentless attention to the weak link in the chain. But perhaps that is precisely the point.

The country has spent decades waiting for the great national electricity breakthrough.

Tegbe’s emerging approach suggests something less dramatic and potentially more practical: make a few economically critical parts of the system work properly, learn from them, strengthen the model, and expand it.

The success of that approach will ultimately be measured not in speeches or megawatts, but in what Nigerians can do with the electricity when it arrives.

Does the factory run a second shift? Does the business hire more workers? Does the hospital keep its equipment running through the night? Does the young entrepreneur stop budgeting for diesel and start budgeting for growth?

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That is where the real power story begins. And that is the standard against which Tegbe’s Energy Zones should ultimately be judged: not by whether 24-hour power sounds impressive in a press release, but by whether the lights stay on long enough for Nigerians to build something with them.