When nurses strike, any sensible nation should panic.
When the people who tend to the ill choose protest over patients, then the system is not just cracked, it’s crumbling.
This week, Nigerian nurses embarked on a seven-day warning strike, led by the National Association of Nigeria Nurses and Midwives (NANNM). Their demand? More pay. Better working conditions. A halt to the rapid brain drain bleeding our hospitals dry. In any half-serious country, this would be a national emergency.
Instead? Silence. Shrugs. Delays.
How did we get here?
A System in Cardiac Arrest.
Let’s be honest: Nigeria’s public healthcare system has been slowly, painfully dying, not for lack of promise, but because of criminal negligence. Doctors and nurses have warned repeatedly. Their pay is scandalously low. Their equipment is obsolete. Their safety is at risk. And now, they are leaving, in droves.
Over 42,000 nurses have left Nigeria in three years alone, many fleeing to the UK, Saudi Arabia, and Canada. Without them, wards are packed, emergencies wait, and patients die, not from disease, but from neglect.
The government knows this. The numbers are not hidden. The warnings are not new. And yet, action has been minimal, sometimes superficial, and sometimes non-existent.
Health Workers Are Not Machines
Let us put it simply: Nigeria’s nurses are heroes. They work long hours, for little pay, with bad equipment, and too often under abusive conditions and still show up to work, day after day, in a system that gives them very little in return. And now, they’ve had enough.
This strike is not political. It is existential.
It is a case of saving the profession from extinction in Nigeria. It is a case of saying, “We will not die in silence while caring for others.” To minimize their strike to mere industrial action is to miss the point. This is a symptom of a healthcare system that is coughing blood — and now gasping for air.
Government: The Time for Talk is Over
No more round tables and promises. The Federal Ministry of Health and state governments must act, not next year, not next quarter but now.
- Amend the salary structure.
- Improve working conditions.
- Grant adequate staffing levels.
- Grant housing, hazard allowances, and career incentives.
- Attempt to reverse the brain drain or at least slow it down.
These are not luxuries. They are the bare essentials for a workable system. And when this warning strike is ignored, what may next result could be total paralysis.
The Human Cost
We must never forget who suffers the most: the ordinary Nigerian. It is not the elite who can access private clinics or medical holidays to London. It is the woman in Jos in labour with no midwife. The accident victim in Ikorodu with no nurse on duty. The child in Kano whose fever becomes fatal because there is no one to take vitals.
Every strike, every protest, every resignation from the ranks of our healthcare leaves a void in the life of an average individual.
Final Word: Fix It, or Watch It Die
This is not merely a labour dispute. This is a life-and-death battle for the soul of Nigerian healthcare. The question now isn’t whether the nurses are correct. They are.
The question is, does the government have the courage to admit failure and the resolve to fix it.
Because when the nurses are gone, and the hospitals are stripped, and the morgues are full, it will be too late to say, “We didn’t see it coming.”
We saw it.
We ignored it.
And that is the real sickness.
