By: Bolaji Olabode
Nigeria is a country where sickness is a billionaire and health is a beggar. Here, disease walks on stilts while hospitals crawl on their knees. Chronic kidney disease (CKD) has become our silent Boko Haram, ambushing 35 million Nigerians, killing without bullets, leaving families bankrupt and broken. For years, dialysis was not treatment—it was ransom. ₦50,000 a session was the price of breathing. The poor died, not because God called them, but because poverty did.
Then came Tinubu, the Jagaban turned physician-in-chief. With one presidential flourish, he took a machete to the cost. Dialysis fell to ₦12,000. A coup against the tyranny of sickness. A miracle in a land where miracles are often rented by pastors and sold in plastic bottles. Suddenly, hope entered the ward, the condemned saw a reprieve. Lazarus rose, not at Bethany this time, but in our hospitals. For this, he deserves a bow—perhaps not from praise singers who clap louder than sense, but from widows and orphans who now buy another sunrise without mortgaging their souls.
But let us not confuse a candle for the sun. Tinubu has cut the price of dialysis, yes. But what is the use of cheap dialysis when the chairs are empty and the machines are fewer than prophets in heaven? What comfort is ₦12,000 when patients wait in serpentine lines, only to be told: “Come tomorrow, the machine has fainted.” A subsidy without supply is a sermon without scriptures. It is like offering free bus rides in a city with no buses. It risks being seen as a political selfie, a policy Instagram filter—pretty, but hollow.
I speak not as a pundit but as a mourner. A friend and classmate at the university died of CKD just this week. Family and friends emptied their pockets into his veins, but the disease was richer than us all. The system connived with death, and now his funeral is another recurring decimal in Nigerian households.
So what next, Mr. President? More machines, more wards, more trained hands. Don’t let this subsidy be another “good PR” balloon floating over bad hospitals. Let the private sector join in, not with billboards plastered with your face, but with dialysis centers planted in communities where patients collapse in queues. If India can marry capitalism with compassion, why must Nigeria wed greed with grief?
And let this dialysis subsidy be the beginning, not the end. Malaria still slaughters children faster than Boko Haram. Mothers still bleed to death in candlelit hospitals. Cancer still sneaks in like a silent coup. Why stop at kidneys when the whole body is rotting?
For now, Tinubu’s move is a spark in the dark. But sparks can either light bonfires or fizzle into ash. He has given us a discount on life; now let him give us a chance to live it.
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Bolaji Olabode is a Public Analyst and Educational Consultant. He writes from Osogbo, Osun State
