A former Minister of Health, Prof Isaac Adewole, has said Nigeria’s health sector had failed to improve in the last 30 years as the health indicators for the country are still not encouraging.

 The former minister added that only 43 per cent of Nigerian women “receive care when they are in labour while only 53 per cent of our children are immunised.”

 Adewole spoke on Tuesday while delivering a keynote speech at the seventh lecture of The Foursquare Gospel Church in Nigeria in Lagos State.

The lecture, with the theme, ‘Health and Wealth: The Global Impact,’ was chaired by the president of the Pharmaceutical Society of Nigeria, Sam Ohuabunwa.

Adewole, said, “Nigeria faces severe health challenges that undermine the country’s human capital development performance. Life expectancy in Nigeria in 2018 was 54 years. The number of women dying from pregnancy and childbirth are 512 in every 100,000 live births.

“The poor health indicators are essentially due to low coverage of health interventions. Only 43 per cent of our women receive care when they are in labour. Skilled birth attendance is still very low. Immunisation averages 53 per cent and in other words, many of our children are not immunised.

“We have remained virtually on the same level over the last 30 years. The problem of this country is that we have low revenue compared to the Gross Domestic Product; we cannot collect taxes. We have a lot of people on the informal sector. The labour force is enormous, the unemployment rate is rising and the economy is becoming increasingly informal.

“For us to achieve socio-economic development, we must achieve improvement in health. The same was done in South Korea where they first improved their health systems and this affected their socio-economic development in the country – same was for Malaysia.”

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The Lagos State Governor, Babajide Sanwo-Olu, who was represented by the state Commissioner for Health, Prof. Akin Abayomi, said the fight against COVID-19 was a testament that issues of health could not be undermined in any country.

“If the magnitude of COVID-19 as it happened in the northern hemisphere had hit Africa, we would have been talking about managing dead bodies instead of managing lives,” Abayomi said.

By Olaleye Aluko