Onimisi Alao
15 December 2008
Executive Secretary of National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS), Dr Mohammed Dogo, in Bayelsa recently for the flag-off of a special health Insurance coverage for pregnant women and children in parts of the state, appealed for cooperation from the international community on the country's moves to facilitate access to good health care for pregnant women and young children.
The NHIS boss was in Oporoma, headquarters of Bayelsa State's Southern Ijaw Local Government Area (SILGA) to formalize the commencement of free health care for the critical segments of the state's population. Initiated by the NHIS, the project is being funded for selected local government areas of the state by the Nigerian office of Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and the state government through the Bayelsa Medicare Service (BMS).
"By this project," Moha-mmed Dogo said at the flag-off ceremony, "we hope that the international community will recognize the genuine efforts of the Nigerian government to rise to the challenge of poor maternal and child health."
For decades, Nigeria has been suffering high death rates among women due mainly to complications from child birth, just as a large proportion of children have long been known to die before their fifth year. Statistics indicate that a close relationship exists between the well-being of the mother and the health of the child. The mortality ratio for children under five years old in Nigeria, according to a source, is 230 out of every 1000 live births. This is said to mean that 16 children under five years die every ten minutes. The intriguing calculations have it that newborn deaths account for more than a quarter of these deaths especially within the first week of life owing mainly to pregnancy and delivery-related complications.
Significantly, the 4th Millennium Development Goal focuses on the need to reduce child mortality by two thirds by the year 2015.
Troubled by this reality against the target of the health-specific MDGs, the NHIS designed the free health insurance scheme for the vulnerable women and children and got the MDG office to provide five billion naira to fund the project in three LGAs in each of six selected states for the first (pilot) year, namely Bayelsa, Gombe, Imo, Niger, Oyo, and Sokoto.
For Bayelsa, the NHIS/MDGs/BMS Project will cover six local government areas (LGAs), including the SILGA, Brass, and Ekeremo. These were the three initially pencilled to benefit from the scheme from the N700 Million coming from the MDGs office for the state, but because, prompted by the NHIS, the Bayelsa State Government has provided like sum as counterpart funding, three more LGAs of the state will now benefit from the project in the pilot year.
Speaking at the Oporoma event, Bayelsa State Governor, Chief Timipre Sylva, said, "Our passion is to ensure that all citizens enjoy good health. It is on account of this that the government is partnering with NHIS and MDG to alleviate the health burden of our people in rural areas by giving them access to good health care."
As headquarters of an LGA, Oporoma should have certain amenities to give it the attributes of its kind elsewhere. It has no such amenities. Some of the first things you could notice the minute you reach the town include absence of four-wheel vehicles: no cars, no buses, no trucks, name them, they do not exist here. Oporoma is a town of walkways and no motor roads.
You can only get to Oporoma from any part of the country by air or water transport. While government officials and perhaps a few privileged citizens get to it and out of it using a helicopter, the majority poor who live much of their life in the town do their journeys by boat. Anyone who chooses to bring in a car does so employing the service of a barge. This is not a preferred option for reason of high cost.
Journey by boat is costly enough. By boat or barge, you pay fares that are very possibly more than twice what you will pay if Oporoma is such that taxes or buses are available. The town is only 45 kilometres from the Bayelsa State capital Yenagoa, but a boat ride costs N700 on a normal day and residents say it could push beyond N2,000 in periods of emergency such as scarcity of fuel.
One man who found the transport situation quite instructive was the NHIS boss, Dogo, who insisted on travelling into and out of Oporoma by boat instead of a helicopter which the Bayelsa State Government provided.
"Better for me to travel the way the ordinary residents do, that way I will know what it means to live in the place to which I'm taking health insurance," Dogo explained.
Health amenities are some of the many that Oporoma lacks. All it boasts of is what a resident describes in these words: "Can I call it a health-care centre? Okay, it is a health centre that is like a patent medicine shop except that it has no medicines."
Oporoma-born Hawkins Kalabo Dio and member of the Bayelsa State House of Assembly believes the new NHIS/MDGs/BMS partnership is one of many development projects that will give the town and SILGA as a whole a much desired new sense of being.
He told Daily Trust: "I count it a privilege that out of only three local government areas selected for this pilot project, the constituency which I represent falls within one. I've made a personal pledge to see to it that the project succeeds and that is exactly what I'm going to do."
Hawkins Dio who has constructed a jetty at Oporoma as part of his constituency projects commended the NHIS executive secretary Dogo Mohammed for "the patriotic love he has demonstrated towards my people," said other development projects would follow the one in view.
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