I write today about a personal experience regarding a general topic that should affect every Nigerian. I write this in forced surrender, but with deep pain in my heart. It’s an emotional personal story, but one filled with a collectively sad commentary about the low level of Nigeria’s health delivery.
It is the story of my 12-year-old son, David Fasetire, whose dream of becoming a globally acclaimed football star is about to be truncated by the failure of our health workers to dislodge a tumour that keeps spreading on his neck.
The tumour’s spread is not for lack of effort on the part of my wife and me, but due to the inability of both private and public health workers whom we have visited to take decisive action that could have nipped the tumour in the bud from the word go.
The story began at a highly acclaimed but now obviously overrated hospital located along Unity Street, off Governor Road, Ikotun, Lagos. To my greatest surprise, after paying N36,000 to cover registration, tests, and drugs, I was told in a subtle style that the boy needs ‘specialist attention’ at the nearby government-owned general hospital. In other words, the private hospital collected money for what they knew they could not do!
Nonetheless, our next port of call was the aforementioned General Hospital, and the doctor on duty alarmingly told my wife, “Your son has a cancerous growth which needs urgent attention before it spreads out of control. He needs surgery that will cost about N300,000 only.”
Rather than get scared, I calmly sent out an SOS message via various WhatsApp groups, and, to God be all the glory, many emotionally charged well-wishers responded faster than I thought.
We got N850,000 that same night and proceeded to the hospital, happily, the following day, so that the treatment could start in earnest. At the end of the day, after making payments for tests, scan, blood bank, surgical tools, injections, drugs, drips, dressing items and bandages – we spent over N900,000, which was well above the N300,000 margin the doctor initially stated.
All the money was spent in high spirits, because I felt the process towards my son’s recovery had begun, and I was grateful to all donors who helped us in garnering more money than I had expected. Alarmingly, all the glee disappeared the following morning when we got to the hospital and were informed that junior doctors who would assist in the surgery were on strike. So, the process could not commence as planned, and everything had to be put on hold.
Alarmingly, the strike persisted for seven months (July 2025 – February 2026). During that time, most of the material expired and became useless, meaning we would need to make fresh purchases anytime we were called to eventually come for the procedure.
All through that long spell, three riddles kept rolling through my mind – Did they not know they were going on strike before telling us to make payment? Why did they collect the money when they knew they were going on strike? Why tell us it was urgent when, indeed, they would eventually delay us for seven months? Questions begging for answers.
Ironically, when the doctors eventually called us for the long-awaited surgery in the last week of February, they ended up extracting dead tissue from my son’s nostrils only, without touching any part of the swollen neck (internally or externally). More questions then emerged: Were they scared of performing major surgery on the boy? Did they not know exactly what to do? Were they just giving the boy makeshift attention to justify all the money they had collected? More questions, no answers.
After five months and seeing that the lump was getting bigger and painkillers could no longer keep the kid comfortable, I decided to take him to a ‘specialist hospital’ along Akowonjo Road, near Egbeda, with great expectations of finally getting better treatment. Sadly, the story has turned out to be no better than where we were at the beginning.
After collecting N20,000 for registration, N95,000 for tests, scan and x-ray, N8,000 for drugs and N10,000 for doctor’s appointment, we were twice tacitly told by two different doctors to proceed to Lagos State University Teaching Hospital for ‘specialised attention’ – but without any proper referral letter from the ‘specialist hospital’ at Akowonjo. So disheartening!
When I shared this story with some associates in my neighbourhood, they urged me to take legal action against all three hospitals, especially now that benefactors who made donations to me are looking at me as a trickster and scammer who is collecting money through deception. Rather than do that, though, I’ve decided to leave it all to God for judgement, while also knowing that legal action is both money and time-consuming.
Correlatively, as I prepare to embark on the next stage of this unusual saga about my son’s health, I begin to wonder about the acumen of Nigeria’s current generation of health workers. As I do so, I recall lamentations by many Nigerian university lecturers in recent years that most undergraduates carry secondary school results that they appear to have bought rather than earned.
I have gone one step further to infer that even our graduates now emerge from the Ivory Tower with certificates that they cannot defend in practical terms. What then would you expect when such graduates are in the medical field? The answer is what I’ve experienced at two private hospitals and a public one within the Ikotun-Igando-Akowonjo axis.
That means we must all redouble our efforts and prayers for continued good health in our lives. At the same time, I have to start praying hard that there will be a better end to this story when my son’s health saga continues at LASUTECH. Watch out for part two!
Sam Fasetire, a veteran sports journalist, writes from Lagos
