Ngige’s incestuous affair with Marie Antoinette -By Festus Adedayo

Marie Antoinette, the last Queen of France before the French Revolution, had taken the liberty to pass a mean comment on her people like Chris Ngige, Nigeria’s Minister of Labour and Employment had done last week. Antoinette was married at age 14 in May, 1770 to then Prince Louis-Auguste who was heir apparent to the French throne and later became Queen, upon Louis XV1 ascension to the throne. Antoinette was however roundly disliked by the French populace on account of accusations that she was wasteful, profligate and promiscuous.


The staple food of the French peasantry and the working class at this time was bread, upon which they spent half of their income. Bread was thus an object of national interest to which the French were rankly obsessed. Its shortage during this time thus threw France into turmoil. In 1775, as a result of the scarcity of flour to make bread, a Flour War erupted in France and Antoinette’s reputation for aloofness to the people’s travail was further damaged. A famine had indeed occurred. In 1843, when told of the wide suffering engendered by widespread bread shortages, Antoinette the Queen was quoted to have said “Then let them eat brioche (bread)!”


During the week that just ended, Chris Ngige, like Antoinette, was equally hanged on the crucifix of the people’s tongues, guillotined for his infelicity. His crime: he unguardedly stomped on Nigerians’ sore foot, provoking the people’s rank discontent. From the wide-ranging snide comments and insults hauled by the jeering crowd on the diminutive minister in discussions across board, it is apparent that no other issue in Nigeria today clearly signposts and manifests the people’s touchy disposition as the decay in their country’s health sector.


So when, on a Channels TV Sunrise Daily programme, Ngige said Nigeria had enough medical doctors and the emigration of medics raised no cause for alarm on the country’s health sector, he was a sure meat for roast. Apparently threatened by the outpour of grievances by Nigerians at this ministerial infelicity, which shows ruling elite and governmental disconnect from the people’s pains and agonies, Ngige, almost immediately, attempted a riposte, in form of a rebuttal. This eventually turned out not only feeble but worse than his initial infamous gaffe.


What can unlock this riddle of government appointees regularly taking fancy at stomping on the wound of the people? Many people have submitted that it is what is called the Marie Antoinette or Emperor Hui spirit. In Nigeria, we have had similar afflictions, chief of which is labeled the David Mark spirit. Nigeria had had similar infelicities from her own Antoinette and Hui when then Brgadier David Mark, as Minister of Communication, had wondered why the mass of the people wanted the luxury of a telephone. It is a spirit whose major credential is conceit for the lowly and underprivileged. Another character in history who made similar insidious comment against his people was Emperor Hui of Western Jin who lived from 259–307. Cited in the Book of Jin which is a chronicle of Chinese Jin Dynasty, it was recounted that when the Emperor was told that his people were starving due to shortage of rice, he had quipped, “Why don’t they eat (ground) meat?”


The Nigerian health sector has suffered considerably over the years. The sector has worsened almost irretrievably. Thousands of our countrymen have met their untimely deaths in the theatre of death that Nigerian hospitals have become. Multiple factors of governmental abandonment and lackluster disposition to its sustenance, dangerous Nigerian work ethos of pilferage of equipment and drugs, lackadaisical attitude of staff and aloofness to the survival of the workplace by workers are the malaises that bedevil the Nigerian health sector, which have almost clobbered it to death. It is so bad that one must daily pray never to be a victim, called patient, of any Nigerian hospital or else, it is a passport to die from avoidable, cheap ailments. There are no equipment to properly diagnose what ails our people, prompting Nigerians to daily wheel scarce foreign exchange to India and other countries.


American billionaire, Bill Gates, puts the urgency of a revamp of our healthcare succinctly at his visit to Nigeria in 2018. “Nigeria is one of the most dangerous places in the world to give birth, with the fourth worst maternal mortality rate in the world, ahead of only Sierra Leone, Central African Republic and Chad. One in three Nigerian children is chronically malnourished,” he had said.


It is global knowledge that Nigerian hospitals are about the worst in the world with an impudent and gross violation of the World Health Organization (WHO) recommendation of 1 doctor to 500 people. In Nigeria, it is about 1 medic to 5000 patients. With a population of about 200 million, Ngige’s submission that Nigerian medical doctors are too many is not only jaundiced, it is otiose for the reality of now. At present, about 72000 doctors are said to be on the register of the Nigerian Medical Council, 40000 in active practice, with the rest caving in to an earlier shambolic advice by the Minister of Health, Isaac Adewole that doctors should go till the land and abandon the stethoscope.


Adewole had said this on Friday, September 21, 2018 at the opening ceremony of the 38th Annual General Meeting and Scientific Conference of the National Association of Resident Doctors of Nigeria (NARD). “The man who sews my gown is a doctor. He makes the best gown. And some will be specialists, some will be GPs, some will be farmers,” he had said of a Nigeria that is in dire need of doctors. He was Ngige’s precursor in that bombastic claim that there was no shortage of Nigerian doctors.


Perhaps the most insidious of Ngige’s waffle was his justification of doctors’ emigration on account of the equipment they send home and the cash they repatriate therefrom. Only an unserious country administered by leaders who can see seldom beyond the tips of their noses would engraft the wellbeing of their country on incidental earnings of her citizens who run away from her harsh environment to take refuge as concierges in another man’s country. It is simple arithmetic which shows that this meager repatriation home cannot match the huge national subsidy expended by the Nigerian government on training of doctors. It is also common knowledge that before these doctors can repatriate a hundred dollar of money which I call destitute cash home, their foreign consort countries must have benefitted five thousand dollars in earnings from mortgage and other ancillary deductions which fatten their own economies. Why don’t we organize our own country in such a way that we will keep our doctors here and the world can come here to pay us foreign currencies to get treatment, as it was in the 1950s, 1960s Nigeria?


These kinds of comments from Nigerian leaders are reflective of the quality of their thought process. The comments signpost a decadence of mind that even education cannot rescue. They find anchor in the mind of Marie Antoinette, Emperor Hui and other ludicrous estimation of the people. It is typical of the ruling elite all over the world but more localized among Nigerian leaders whose praetorian and demeaning conception of the ruled is legendary. If Buhari can go AWOL from the presidency to the United Kingdom and his commissars say he owes us all no explanation as to his whereabouts, you can gauge the leaking valve of the minds of those who rule us. So if Ngige, Adewole or any of their ilk tomorrow say we should go roast on the iron gauze, we should not be bewildered. We are the sheep, they are the wolves.