Call me a socialist, a communist, or whatever term you all use to call it, that education and health institutions should not be established for profit is a hill I'm ready to die on 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 4 weeks in a month, and the entire 12 months in a year. Governments should be the ones in charge of hospitals and educational institutions. They should run it by subsidizing the services provided by the taxes paid from other sectors. Health and education are some of the basic needs of humans, you all can at least agree with me in this aspect. The basic needs of the populace should be subsidized by the government.
Still yet to understand? Hear me out.
The education sector in Nigeria is dominated by private investors, especially at the Primary and Secondary school levels. There are also tons of private universities but they are yet to match up to the available government universities in terms of number. Why the proliferation of private, profit-seeking entities in the education sector and what does this portend for education? The answer is staring us in the face.
Parents pay heavily to send their wards to pry and secondary schools since the available government schools are poorly run and don't provide something close to standard services. On one hand, parents who pay through their noses expect solid service in terms of quality education for their wards. On another hand, when standards are applied during promotional exams and some pupils don't meet up, parents are usually reluctant for their wards to repeat classes.
Why should my ward repeat a class after I've paid heavily? They make it look like it's the failure of the school that their wards couldn't meet the set standards. Consequently, some parents end up withdrawing their wards from such schools and taking them somewhere else. This ordinarily shouldn't be a problem. But for a school that is profit-driven, every pupil's withdrawal is a loss. This is why many private schools maintain an aura of faux standards. They doctor the results of pupils and give false representations of their intellectual capacity to their parents or guardians.
By the time parents/guardians realize that they are being played, it's usually too late. As someone who has been heading the administration of a private school here in Nigeria, I'm talking from first-hand experience. To put it on record, the school I'm heading is not profit-driven in any form. A similar situation is derivable even in the university. I taught in a private university as a Lecturer for more than 5 years and I can authoritatively say that they cannot be comparable to government universities in terms of the quality of education being given to students.
Similarly in the health sector, private hospitals outnumber government hospitals in Nigeria with many of them established for the sole purpose of making profits. What makes it worse is that a large percentage of these private hospitals are established by medical doctors working in government hospitals. There are two main issues with this.
First, the need to break even and make profits pushes private hospital staff to overcharge patients for treatment. Some ailments that require simple treatments are exaggerated or deliberately misdiagnosed for the purpose of making more money. Ailments that should ordinarily be referred to more standard hospitals are not referred because of loss of revenue, thus, leading to more complications or even deaths.
Second, the proliferation of private hospitals by doctors working in government hospitals is gradually killing government hospitals. Vital materials and equipment meant for government hospitals are diverted to private hospitals by corrupt elements within the government. Also, ailments that ordinarily should be well attended to in government hospitals are deliberately sabotaged or subtly referred to private hospitals.
When my sister was going to have a surgical operation on her lower spine in a government teaching hospital, agents were sent to me by God knows who to convince me to take her to a private hospital. According to this agent, there are lower chances that the surgery will be successful in the government hospital where we are choosing to do it. She pointed us to a private hospital where a very experienced doctor with an almost 100% success history in similar surgery would do it with his team. This doctor also works in the government hospital where my sister's surgery was to be performed. At the end of the day, I opted for the government hospital and surgery was a success.
With these experiences, you can now see why I am ready to die on the hill that education and health shouldn't be for profit.
Your opinions? Let's have them below.
Thank you for reading.