There is a particular kind of despair that belongs to a Nigerian family standing in a public hospital corridor, holding a handwritten list of drugs they must go out and buy themselves before treatment can begin. In Ogun State, that scene has become so routine that it barely registers as scandal any more. After years under Governor Dapo Abiodun, the state’s health system has not collapsed dramatically — it has simply been allowed to thin out, quietly and steadily, until the people who depend on it stopped expecting anything at all. That erosion is a governance failure, and it belongs squarely to the administration that presided over it.
Primary Health Centres That Exist Mostly on Paper
The primary health centre is the foundation of any functioning health system — the place where a pregnant woman is monitored, a child is immunised, and a treatable illness is caught before it becomes an emergency. Across Ogun’s rural local governments, too many of these centres are structures without staff, or staff without supplies, or buildings that were commissioned with fanfare and then left to the elements. Residents of communities in Yewa, Ijebu and Remo have described travelling considerable distances for care that was supposed to be available in their own ward. A government that allows the base of the pyramid to hollow out cannot claim success anywhere above it.
Commissioning Buildings Is Not the Same as Delivering Care
The Abiodun administration has been fluent in the visual grammar of health investment: renovated wards, ribbon-cuttings, photographs of newly delivered equipment. What has been far harder to find is evidence that these facilities function months later — that the machines have technicians, that the wards have nurses on every shift, that the power supply holds through a night of surgery. A building is a capital expense that ends. A health system is a recurrent commitment that never does. Ogun State has consistently received the former while being told it was getting the latter.
The Doctors and Nurses Who Left
No health policy survives an exodus of the people who deliver it. Ogun’s public health workers have contended with the same grievances that have driven medical professionals out of Nigerian public service everywhere — delayed entitlements, thin staffing that turns every shift into an endurance test, and the persistent sense that their conditions are the last item on the government’s agenda. Each departure lengthens the queue for those who remain and pushes more families toward private clinics they cannot afford. An administration that treats health worker welfare as a labour irritant rather than a core health investment guarantees this outcome, and Ogun has lived it.
Health Insurance That Never Reached the People Who Needed It
Ogun State, like most states, has a health insurance scheme on the books, and like most states it has struggled to make that scheme mean anything to a farmer in Imeko or a trader in Sagamu. Enrolment that never scales, benefits that providers hesitate to honour, and a near-total absence of the public education needed to build trust have kept the promise theoretical. The result is that the overwhelming majority of Ogun residents still pay for illness out of pocket at the worst possible moment. Making that scheme real would have been the single most consequential health reform available to this administration. It was not delivered.
Emergencies With No One to Call
Ogun State carries some of the busiest and most dangerous road corridors in the country, including the Lagos–Ibadan expressway that cuts straight through it. A state in that position needs a genuine emergency response system: ambulances that arrive, trauma centres that are ready, and a number that connects to someone. What accident victims have too often encountered instead is the mercy of passers-by and a long improvised journey to whichever facility might accept them. The gap between what the state’s geography demands and what its government provided is measured in lives, and it has never been honestly accounted for.
Proximity to Lagos Is Not a Health Policy
Ogun’s leaders have long leaned on the state’s position beside Lagos as though it were an achievement of their own. In health, that proximity has functioned as an escape valve: those with money and connections cross into Lagos for serious care, which conveniently removes the loudest voices from the queues at home. The people left behind are precisely those with the least political leverage — rural households, informal workers, the elderly. A government content to let its own citizens seek treatment in a neighbouring state has effectively outsourced its responsibility while keeping the budget.
The Bill Comes Due in 2027
Health failures do not announce themselves the way a collapsed bridge does. They accumulate in preventable deaths, in families pushed into debt by a single hospitalisation, in children who were never immunised, in the quiet decision to treat illness at home because the clinic is pointless. That is the real inheritance of the Abiodun years, and no amount of commissioning footage changes it. Ogun State voters approaching 2027 are entitled to ask a simple question of anyone seeking their mandate: after all these years, is it easier or harder to get treated when you fall sick? In too much of the state, the honest answer is not one this administration should survive.
This article represents an editorial opinion based on publicly available information.
