THE Federal Ministry of Health in Abuja on Monday said that what seemed to be the inability of the federal government to fight the war against tobacco smoking like the rest of the world is weak legislation, which has continued to incapacitate the move in the fight.

The Minister of Health Prof. Onyebuchi Chukwu told journalists in Abuja on Monday during an interactive session that Nigeria would have wished to be on the same page with the rest of the world in their fight in safe guarding the health of the people especially secondary smokers who are unnecessarily exposed to health hazards out of no choice of their own.

To this effect the minister said that the federal government would initiate more stiffer and stringent penalty for tobacco smoker.  He made reference to the effort made by Mr. Olorunnibe Mamora in the sixth senate to sponsor bill that could put an end to smoking in public places in the country but said the effort suffered set back then because there was no strong legislative backing for the move.

Chukwu lamented that the fight against tobacco smoking is one that requires a lot of funding noting that producers of the harmful product are very rich and would fight back any fight put up by the government.  He likened the fight against tobacco to that of fight against corruption, which he said usually fights back.  He said the reason why the country was not involve in any fun fare in the 2013 world No tobacco Day was as a result of the country not having a strong anti-tobacco law yet.

Chukwu reiterated the commitment of the federal government through his ministry to continue the scale-up of health delivery noting that a lot of giant strides had been achieved in recent years in the health sector.

He added that for the first time, the federal government appointed oral health ambassadors for states while the Senate President David Mark is the oral health champion of the country.  Oral health the minister said has not been given much priority in the past, but with the knowledge that oral health take a centre stage in the overall well being of the people, the federal government took steps to bring it to the front burner.

The minister, however, said Nigeria cannot still attain the point of giving 15 per cent to the health sector in the annual budget as a result of other areas of the economy which needed equal attention of the federal government.

He said people has different priority areas of which they want the federal government to allocate fund like education, transport and in recent times security as a result of the security challenges being faced by the country.

Chukwu, however, said in the midst of the meagre financial situation facing every sector of the economy, his ministry has been able to train 60 medical doctors abroad in different areas of professionalism, equip hospitals with state of the art equipment for diagnosis and treatment and generally given hospitals across the country a face lift with federal hospitals now being equipped to the point where long bone fractures such as thigh bones could be treated and the patients discharged in five days instead of being admitted for long periods of time.

He told journalists that the government might not be able to stop people from going abroad for medical treatment because the basic human rights of the people must be respected adding that those who travel abroad occupies and infinitesimal number of the populace and more importantly they are people who can afford such trips.

He gave instances where people travel abroad just to have their babies out of their personal desire that they wanted their wards to be citizens of another country or have dual citizenship.  The minister maintained that this scenario would not be as a result of the inability of hospitals in Nigeria to take delivery of babies but out of personal choices of those concerned.  In like manners, he said people sought medical treatment abroad for other ailments that can be handled with in the country.

In recent times the minister said hospitals in Nigeria had done kidney transplants, open-heart surgery, brain surgery and other serious cases that usually had people referred abroad.

Commenting on the rancour recently experienced in the health workers’ cadre, the minister said the development is due to personal aggrandizement of the people involved.  He said such rancour and disagreement is not obtainable in private practices, noting that it is only with the government employees that such relationship cracks is being experienced.

On the high ration of patients to doctors in government hospitals, the minister admitted that the country is experiencing low population of medical doctors noting that any doctor who had graduated from medical school and is still finding it difficult to be gainfully employed has other ulterior motives ranging from their wanting to stay in the major urban cities of the country and their desire to work in a particular hospital.  The minister said there is no way anybody can graduate from the medical school and claim to be jobless.

The minister also said the country has recorded a 78 per cent coverage on immunisation as against the 45 per cent in past.  He said to record a 100 per cent coverage, the country would soon be self- reliant on drug production in order to crash the prices of malaria treatment drugs.  He added that it is his desire for Nigeria to attain universal health insurance coverage.

He also hinted that the ministry is doing its best in the area of medical research and the reason why its effort is not noticeable is because medical research is a long term investment noting that most of the time, it may take as long as 30 years before the results begin to manifest.

The minister called for public private partnership of government hospitals noting that some sections of some federal hospitals were already being operated on a PPP basis to be able to provide world-class services.

He listed some of them as the ultra-modern cardiac centre at University College Hospital, Ibadan, which he said is the latest in the world, and some of the latest MRI and CT scan equipment at the Lagos University Teaching Hospital.

According to him, more of such centres were in the offing, while President Goodluck Jonathan had directed that six such tertiary health facilities be set up across the country before 2015.

He also called on states and local governments across the country to make good of the share of the money they get from the centre noting that the federal government had been doing well in the health sector in the utilisation of its share of the money realized from the partial subsidy removal, he asked Nigerians to challenge their state and local governments to account for their shares of the money for the programme known at the federal level as SURE-P.