The Group Managing Director of Zedcrest Group, Adedayo Saheed Amzat has called for deliberate efforts in government circle to fix the infrastructure deficit in the nation’s health sector.

He said that Nigeria should not forget the lessons from Corona Virus (COVID-19) pandemic, especially as it requires putting necessary infrastructure in place to combat such precarious situations in future.

I recently had an Instagram Live Chat with Amzat on the theme; “Implications of COVID-19 on Nigerian Economy: Way Forward for Businesses”.

He stated that the battle against COVID-19 is one that leaders today must win if we are to find an economically and socially viable path to the next normal.

In his words, “After Ebola crisis the federal government put together all the units involved and merged them into the NCDC (National Centre for Diseases Control), modelled after America’s CDC (Centre for Disease Control). The good thing is that we have a body for pandemics.

“The first step is to create an agency with operational framework like the CDC, like we have done.

“The next step is to increase funding and preparation for the health sector. There was a video by Bill Gates that he did after the Ebola crisis, everything he said is happening right now. There is this theory that anything that can go bad will one day go bad. We have to have a plan for every possible situation

“We need to create our health sector response and model it after the military. The military is funded even when there is no war, it’s like an insurance. Every year there is one health crisis or the other so why do we not have the same response for the military?

“What if HIV comes back what are we going to do? We have to have reserve health doctors that can be called upon for periods when there are health crises that can overwhelm the health sector.

“Before now, the entire health sector was in a mess, the entire community health sector is broken, people say without grants from the Bill and Melinda Gates, the WHO as well as other foreign donors, the primary health system would have packed up totally.

“Unfortunately, this crisis that met us on a bad note. You heard a government official say that he never knew that the Nigerian health sector was this bad. We had a situation where government officials go abroad for the slightest health issue.

“We have to develop our health sector. We need have to large and well-equipped hospitals, we need specialist centers for Cancer, pandemics, well trained medical personnel. Our priority should not be paying some people fat salaries, spending on over-head, changing cars. Our priority has to be the health sector.

“The good thing is that everyone is now forced to rely on the health sector which has been abandoned for so long. This is a good time to invest more in the health space”.