Moghalu laments brain drain, advocates higher budget for health

The former Deputy Governor for the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), Kingsley Moghalu, on Friday, lamented the exodus of Nigerian professionals to foreign countries.

Groups and individuals in Nigeria have expressed concern over the brain drain in health and other sectors of the nation’s economy and urged the Federal Government to halt the trend.

In a series of tweets on his Twitter handle, the Young Progressives Party (YPP) presidential candidate in the 2019 election challenged the government to find urgent solutions to the problem.

He also called for an increase in the budgetary allocations to the health sector.

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Moghalu wrote: “Nigeria’s medical doctors are leaving in droves for greener pastures in other countries. Those at home are often brilliant, but improvise a lot because they don’t have the state of the art equipment available to hospitals in the West and Asia.

“We must keep our doctors and nurses at home with incentives for them as well as teachers. These are two bedrocks of a society that wants to become developed. A good healthcare system with solid primary and higher levels of healthcare that caters to the poor in rural and urban areas is important. We also need specialist hospitals for more complicated health care needs.

“Non-communicable diseases like diabetes and cancer are becoming an epidemic. No federal or state budget should devote less than 15% of its total to health care.”

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