PART 9 OF 50: GONE. GONE. GONE.
Aare Amerijoye DOT.B
Look up at the departure board.
LONDON. ON TIME.
MANCHESTER. ON TIME.
TORONTO. BOARDING.
RIYADH. BOARDING.
DUBLIN. FINAL CALL.
Now look at the faces in the queue.
A nurse from Ogbomoso, holding her new passport as if it might fly away. A surgeon from Enugu with two suitcases and a heart he is leaving behind. A midwife from Kaduna. A pharmacist from Ilorin. A laboratory scientist from Calabar. A young doctor from Jos who finished his housemanship last month.
The gate opens.
Gone.
The plane lifts off into the night sky.
Gone.
And somewhere in Nigeria, tomorrow morning, a hospital ward opens with one less nurse, one less doctor, one less pair of hands.
Gone. Gone. Gone.
The most expensive room in Nigeria is not in Aso Rock. It is the departure hall at the international airport.
SIX DOCTORS A DAY
Here is the number, and it does not come from a politician. It comes from inside the medical profession itself.
At the 2026 annual conference of the Nigerian Medical Association in Oyo State, the Medical Director of the Federal Medical Centre, Abeokuta, reported that more than 16,000 Nigerian doctors emigrated between 2017 and 2023.
Now do the arithmetic.
More than six doctors. Every. Single. Day.
Six on Monday. Six on Tuesday. Six on Sallah day. Six on Christmas morning. Six on the very day your mother collapsed in the kitchen and was rushed to the emergency ward.
Seven years. Six a day. Without stopping.
And the nurses? Reports have put the number of Nigerian nurses who left since 2021 at around 42,000. Dozens every day, folding their uniforms into suitcases and carrying their skills to hospitals that will never treat a Nigerian.
These are not numbers on a page.
They are the five-hour wait in the outpatient clinic.
They are the single exhausted doctor covering a ward meant for four.
They are the house officer alone at three in the morning, with your child’s life in his trembling hands.
They are the empty chair in the consulting room where a specialist used to sit.
THE NAMES BEHIND THE NUMBERS
When the hands leave and the hospitals are starved, people die. Not in theory. In real wards, on real nights, with real names.
Remember Kano. In September 2025, Aminu Kano Teaching Hospital, one of the biggest hospitals in Northern Nigeria, was cut off from power over unpaid electricity bills running close to a billion naira. The hospital said it struggles to pay its power bills from its own internally generated revenue, the same money it uses to buy diesel. For three days, the hospital sat in darkness. Three patients in the Intensive Care Unit reportedly died. Hundreds of others suffered through the blackout. Neither the hospital nor the power company accepted responsibility.
Three lives in an ICU. Lost, by the reported account, in the dark. In a hospital left to fend for itself.
Remember Ibadan. From November 2024 to February 2025, University College Hospital, Nigeria’s first teaching hospital, was disconnected from the grid over an unpaid electricity debt. For 102 consecutive days, one of the most important hospitals in this nation was without grid power. Vaccines spoiled. Surgeries were cancelled. New admissions were halted. Patients on life support lived at the mercy of generators.
One hundred and two days. In Nigeria’s first teaching hospital.
Ask yourself one question. Why is a federal teaching hospital left to scrape together its own electricity bill from the fees of sick people? That is not the failure of a hospital. It is the failure of a government that will not fund the institutions it owns.
Remember Abeokuta, only days ago. On 17 October 2026, Taiwo Godwin Ayodeji, a young nursing student at the School of Nursing, Aro, died after an asthma attack at the Federal Neuropsychiatric Hospital. An eyewitness has alleged that he was placed on oxygen equipment but the oxygen was not turned on. The hospital has confirmed his death and announced an investigation.
A young man training to save lives, losing his own on a hospital bed.
And remember the old wounds that have never closed. In Lagos in 2021, the wife of a Deputy Provost of the Nigerian Institute of Journalism was driven from hospital to hospital for about seven hours, and five hospitals said there was no bed space, until she stopped breathing on the road. In Ibadan in 2021, Ebenezer Ayeni, a young man shot by armed robbers a week before his wedding, died after hospitals reportedly demanded a police report before treating him, even though the law says gunshot victims must be treated without one.
No bed. No light. No oxygen. No doctor. No treatment.
Every one of these stories ends the same way: a family at a graveside, asking why.
Nigerians are not dying because medicine has failed. They are dying because the system has.
WE TRAIN THEM. THE WORLD HIRES THEM.
Now hear the madness of it.
Nigeria spends years and fortunes training a doctor. Medical school. Clinical postings. Housemanship. Residency. Nigerian patients lie on Nigerian beds so that the young doctor can learn on their bodies.
Then, at the very moment that doctor becomes most valuable, we let him walk to the airport. And a richer country receives a finished specialist without spending a single kobo on his training.
We are the world’s most generous donor of medical talent.
And we are giving it away while our own people die in the queue.
It is like a farmer who tends his crop for seven long years, waters it through the dry season, protects it from the locusts, and then, on the morning it ripens, carries the whole harvest to his neighbour’s barn and goes home to feed his children nothing.
We are exporting our cure and importing our funerals.
WHY THEY GO
Stop a Nigerian doctor at the departure gate and ask why she is leaving.
She will not tell you she hates her country. She will tell you her country stopped loving her back.
She will tell you about salaries that arrive late, or never. About arrears owed for months. About agreements signed by government and abandoned before the ink was dry. About thirty-six hour shifts without sleep. About theatres with no light, wards with no oxygen and hospitals left to beg for their own power. About colleagues kidnapped on the road to work. About a profession that saves other people’s lives but cannot protect its own family from the cost of living.
In April 2026, as resident doctors prepared to strike, Atiku described it as unacceptable that doctors should have to beg for entitlements the government had already agreed to pay. He pointed to a wider pattern of disregard for health workers that is driving so many of them abroad.
Read it again, slowly.
Government signs.
Government delays.
Government makes the doctor beg.
Then government asks why the doctor left.
And what was the official answer to the exodus? In 2024, the nursing council brought in rules requiring nurses to work in Nigeria for two years before their qualifications could be verified for work abroad. Nurses went to court over it.
That is not a solution. That is a padlock.
You do not keep a nurse by chaining her to the ward. You keep her by making the ward a place worth staying.
A cage is not a career.
ATIKU’S ANSWER: MAKE THEM WANT TO STAY
Now hear the answer.
Point 10 of Atiku’s 12 Point Agenda to Rescue, Revive and Restore Nigeria commits to a healthcare overhaul, and it names the wound directly: affordable basic healthcare, and fixing the shortage of medical personnel.
Fix it. Not trap them. Not lecture them about patriotism. Fix the shortage.
And there is only one way to fix it: destroy, one by one, the reasons they leave and the failures that kill.
Pay them what they are owed. A government that keeps its word to its doctors does not have to watch them walk to the airport.
Fund and equip the hospitals. In his acceptance speech on 27 May 2026, Atiku committed to investment in primary healthcare centres and in specialist hospitals. A hospital that is properly funded does not have to choose between its electricity bill and its patients. Give a surgeon a working theatre, oxygen, light and modern equipment, and he does not need Manchester to practise medicine. He can practise it in Maiduguri.
Power the wards. Under point 6 of the agenda, power sector reform will end discriminatory billing and make electricity affordable. Affordable, reliable power and properly funded hospitals are how the lights stay on in the ICU.
Make the road safe. Security stands first in Atiku’s plan, with intelligence-led operations and stronger, better-equipped security forces. A doctor who is not afraid of being kidnapped on the way to work is a doctor who stays.
Make life affordable. Under the Atiku Economic Recovery Plan, lower fuel and transport costs ease the burden on every household, including the households of health workers whose salaries have melted away.
Pay them. Equip them. Power them. Protect them. And they will stay.
TURN THE PLANES AROUND
Here is the part they do not want you to believe: the exodus can be reversed.
Thousands of Nigerian doctors and nurses abroad still call Nigeria home. They send money back every month. They fly in for weddings and burials. They watch the news from Lagos, Kano and Enugu with a longing they cannot hide.
Many of them would come back, or give part of their time back, if they believed the conditions at home had truly changed.
A government that pays its health workers, funds and equips its hospitals and keeps its promises is a government that can say to its sons and daughters abroad: come home, the country you left is not the country you will return to.
That is how a departure hall becomes an arrivals hall.
That is how the board changes from LONDON, FINAL CALL to LAGOS, WELCOME HOME.
THE SAME CONVICTION, YEAR AFTER YEAR
This is not a new tune for an election season. For years, Atiku’s policy documents have named health as a foundation of human development and have recognised that Nigeria is losing its best professionals abroad. When he says the shortage of medical personnel must be fixed, he is not reading a campaign script. He is repeating a conviction he has carried for years, now turned into a specific commitment.
And he knows what keeps an institution alive in the hardest times. The American University of Nigeria, which he founded with his own money in Yola, stayed open through the insurgency and fed displaced people in their hundreds of thousands. An institution survives a war only when the people inside it are kept, valued and supported.
He kept his institution standing through war. He knows that institutions stand on the people who stay.
TO THE NURSE AT GATE 14
To the nurse at Gate 14, holding her boarding pass and looking back one last time. To the surgeon in Enugu with a visa in his pocket and his heart still at home. To the house officer alone on the ward at three in the morning. To the families in Kano who buried loved ones lost in a darkened ICU. To the classmates of a young nursing student in Abeokuta, still waiting for answers.
None of this was written in the stars. It was written by those who govern. And what one government writes, another can erase.
So do not let this article die on your screen. Fire it into your hospital WhatsApp group, your NMA, NANNM and JOHESU platforms, your family group, your church and mosque groups, your alumni association. Read it aloud to the patient in the next bed. Sit with the nurse who is thinking of leaving, ask her what would make her stay, and show her the point in Atiku’s agenda that answers it. Health workers are trusted in every community in Nigeria. When they speak, people listen. When they move, people follow.
Collect your PVC if it is ready, and keep checking with INEC until it is. On Saturday, 16 January 2027, go early, vote, stay and protect your vote until the result is pasted.
Tonight, the departure board will light up again.
LONDON. TORONTO. RIYADH.
Another mother will cry behind the barrier. Another nurse will hand over her passport. Another ward will lose its hands.
On 16 January, vote to change the board.
Vote Atiku. Vote Amaechi. Vote ADC.
Next: Part 10, Darkness: electricity supply.
#Atiku2027 #AtikuAmaechi2027 #AtikusAnswers #VoteADC
Aare Amerijoye DOT.B
Director General,
The Narrative Force
thenarrativeforce.org
21 October 2026
