No fewer than 353 Nigerian medical doctors were enlisted within a span of 100 days to work in the United Kingdom, according to a report by The PUNCH newspaper. The General Medical Council, which licenses and maintains the official register of medical practitioners in the UK, licensed many Nigeria-trained doctors between June 10, 2021 and September 20, 2021, going by what the paper said it discovered on the body’s website. This means averagely, the UK took in more than three Nigerian doctors every day.

That figure illustrates the meltdown of Nigeria’s healthcare system entailed in ongoing brain drain among medics. PUNCH as well reported that between July 24, 2020 and September 21, 2021, 862 Nigerian doctors were licensed in the UK. In all, 8,737 doctors trained in Nigeria currently practise their art in the UK.

And it isn’t that this trend is limited to the UK. Late in August, more than 500 Nigerian doctors turned up for a recruitment drive the Saudi health ministry conducted in Abuja, ahead of a similar exercise planned for other parts of Nigeria. Doctors say poor remuneration, inadequate sectoral funding, low grade working facilities and societal insecurity are some of the reasons making them seek greener pastures abroad. Mark it, this exodus is happening amid a resurgence of the COVID-19 pandemic, not to mention the outbreak of other deadly epidemics like cholera across Nigerian communities. Meanwhile, there is an industrial action by resident doctors that began on August 1, 2021 and has persisted, with doctors refusing to call it off despite judicial orders mandating that they return to work. They hinged their disposition on serial failure by government to honour memoranda it signed with them in the past.

Only recently, the Chief Medical Director (CMD) of Lagos University Teaching Hospital (LUTH), Idi Araba, Prof. Chris Bode, bemoaned the effect of brain drain, among other challenges, on Nigeria’s healthcare system; he said the emigration of medical staff in all professional cadres had considerably weakened institutional capacity for service delivery. Speaking when members of the House of Representatives Committee on Health Institutions came on oversight inspection of facilities at the hospital, the CMD noted that occasional approvals for staff recruitment were not keeping pace with the drain.

With many mishaps in Nigerian healthcare delivery that suggest poor professional competency, the evidence is that Nigerian doctors are sought after abroad, implying that they are well trained in school and competent in practice. The challenge, then, must be the systemic environment available for them to put their training to use and actualise themselves. This is similar to the case of Nigerian software engineers, among other professionals, who are in hot demand abroad despite poor systemic capacity in the country. Perhaps natural giftedness plays some role, because this is despite the generally shambolic state of the country’s educational system. The frequent mishaps in Nigerian healthcare delivery such as misdiagnoses, lack of attention to details, inadequate rigour in pre-clinical testing and so on must be a function of debilitating systemic ambience that apparently puts many medics in lackadaisical mode – not unlike the case with professionals in many other sectors.

To revamp the system where even so-called centres of excellence have become glorified morgues, focus must be on recalibrating those factors that induce debilitation. One major hurdle is inadequate sector funding that has left hospitals with dilapidated equipment and medics on poor remuneration despite their long years of training. The message from the brain drain is: if Nigeria does not value its doctors, other countries do and are recruiting them in droves. The bluster by labour and employment minister Chris Ngige in April 2019 that Nigeria has a surplus of medical doctors and is now exporting is totally at variance with statistical and operational benchmarks of the healthcare system. By all accounts, the brain drain is bad for the country and puts average citizens in dire straits. Only that the elite do not feel distressed because they could afford medical tourism.