The Workforce that produced 99.4% of Nigeria’s GDP received 0.6% worth of medical care and 1.7% worth of educational support compared to Ghana’s 4.4% educational support.
The Gross Domestic Product of an Unhealthy Labour Force
Nigeria’s Gross Domestic Product’s (GDP’s) structure reveals a huge gap in the physical and psychosocial wellbeing of the working population. The GDP measures the Naira value of the products and services provided by the population in a country, state or region.
The services sector of the Nigerian economy contributed 54% of the GDP, above the Industrial sector (24%) and the Agricultural sector (22%). However, the measure of output from “human health and social services” is less than 1% (0.6%).
For the monetary value of a sector’s output to be critically low as this, at least two things could be responsible. It’s either there is low investment in Nigeria’s health services sector, and thus the little number of people employed in the sector or the enormous labour output in the sector is undervalued in terms of payments and remunerations, or both.
The answers are not far fetched. What Nigeria’s health data and the frequent strikes by health workers reveal is that healthcare centres are underequipped, hospitals are understaffed, the few health workers are underpaid, and 200 million people in need of adequate health care services are underserved.
While decrying the state of infant mortality during the Nigerian Medical Association’s annual Physician’s week, Dr Olamide Brown remarked that “The budget for health care per person in Norway is $6000; the United Kingdom is about $4000; but in Nigeria, it is $6.
The UK is spending $200bn for 65 million citizens on health care whereas Nigeria is spending $1bn on health care for its about 200 million population.”
A similar comparison by Aljazeera states, “While the annual healthcare threshold per person in the US is $10,000, in Nigeria it is just $6.”
Thus, on Nigeria’s GDP tower is heard the weak tweets of a physically spent labour force who climbed its steeped income steps to scramble for the country’s lean healthcare services, and at other times, the compulsive tweets of a viable but vulnerable population.
The Government’s favourable Health Policy: The figures don’t add up
Wait! The World Health Organisation (WHO) reported that Nigeria has one of the best healthcare worker indicators in the world. So, why the many complaints by health workers and patients?
Figures don’t lie! Nigeria is doing well, or so it seems the country’s Human Resources in Health (HRH) indices indicate.
Nigeria’s Human Resources in Health (HRH) Rankings
Source: WHO
Yet, Nigeria’s official policy statements provided to the WHO claiming its policies favour the retention of adequately skilled doctors and nurses in the country, for instance, conflicts with facts on the ground.
A Summary of Nigeria’s Health Indices
When the HRH growth data was compared with people’s poor health realities as shown in the summary of Nigeria’s health indices, the World Health Organisation put it to the Nigerian government to explain why the “apparently favourably HRH and governance environment are not translating into improved health outcomes.”
Nigeria’s number of doctors to population dropped from 0.45 per 1,000 people in 2016 to 0.38 to 1,000 people in 2018. This slowed down to 0.37 medical doctors to 10000 persons in 2020, according to the Federal Ministry of Health.
Source: WHO
One of the reasons for this decline in the ratio of Nigeria’s health workers to the population is the brain drain of its health professionals.
A WHO report observes “The international migration of health workers is increasing. There has been a 60% rise in the number of migrant doctors and nurses working in OECD countries over the last decade.”
However, to meet the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) benchmark, the International Labour Organisation has set a minimum threshold of 4.11 skilled health workers (physicians, nurses/midwives) per 1,000 people, while the WHO set it at 4.45 skilled health workers per 1,000 people.
Currently, Nigeria is at 2.0 skilled health workers (physicians, nurses/midwives) to 1,000 people.
The Gross Domestic Product of a poorly educated population
The Workforce that produced 99.4% of Nigeria’s GDP received 0.6% worth of medical care and 1.7% worth of educational support. Thus the education and health sectors situate among the last 7 sectors which altogether contribute the last 6% to Nigeria’s GDP.
Education and health are reported widely to have a positive relationship. And like the lean GDP figures for human health and social services, the low value of output from the educational sector too can be traced to either a low investment in Nigeria’s education sector, and thus, a little number of people employed in the sector or the enormous labour output in the education sector too is undervalued in terms of payments and remunerations, or both.
“Basic educational expertise and skills, including fundamental knowledge, reasoning ability, emotional self-regulation, and interactional abilities, are critical components of health. Moreover, education is a fundamental social determinant of health” Hahn and Truman’s research observed.
However, the two researchers note that, on one hand, education “intentionally engages the receptive capacities of children and others to imbue them with knowledge, skills of reasoning, values, socio-emotional awareness and control, and social interaction, so they can grow as engaged, productive, creative, and self-governing members of a society.”
On the other hand, they note that “Of course, not all educational institutions achieve these goals for all children – far from it; educational institutions in the United States often fall short of goals, and too many students may be led into school failure, social dysfunction, and marginal living conditions with lifelong disadvantages.
The general outlook on the Nigerian adult’s psychosocial profile, socio-economic immobility, and engagements in business and political transactions – mirrors the outcomes of the latter described dysfunctional educational system.
A cross-sectional study in Germany reports: “we hypothesized that low education is associated with a lack of psychosocial resources and more daily hassles, which in turn mediate the relationships between education and mental health… The results support our hypotheses that low education is associated with less psychosocial resources, which in turn serve together with daily hassles as pathways between education and depressive symptoms as well as PMH.”
Thus, a poorly educated labour force may find it hard to effectively interact with people who hold unlike ethnic identities, cultural ideologies and even religious beliefs, as is increasingly becoming the case in Nigeria.
The Gross Domestic Product implication of a #Twitter Ban
An overburdened workforce with little or no health and social care, and its anxiety-prone dependants face a higher risk of depression, self-harm and suicides. And Nigeria’s suicides rates rank among the highest (>15 persons per 100,000) in the world.
Such is the high propensity of the Nigerian government at all levels to inflict social and economic harm on its own citizens, as recent macroeconomic indices suggest.
While the government neglects its poorly performing education and health sectors, it is endangering a relatively viable sector through its recent #Twitter ban.
The GDP of the Telecommunications and Information Sector is the fifth-largest contributor to Nigeria’s GDP, valued at 10.1% of the total output of the country.
The #Twitter brand among many social media platforms serves as a vehicle for promoting the constituent industries in the information and telecommunications sector. An onslaught against social media platforms is counterproductive to the investment, employment and output in this viable sector.
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