By Landing Colley
Fatoumatta Touma Njai, National Assembly Member for Banjul South has urged fellow members to support the health sector in order to avoid people getting health treatments abroad.
“We need to strengthen our hospital to avoid people seeking medical treatment abroad. I was a victim of that and I spent millions of Dalasi treating myself abroad. If we have strengthened our medical hospital here that would not happen,” she said during the debate on the budget estimate 2021.
She added that under the Ministry of Health, the first paragraph of the budget estimate states that D4.3million should be redirected from hospital to the central Ministry saying “I don’t think any sane person will redirect any resources from a hospital to a ministry.”
“I think if covid-19 has not taught us a lesson, we need to awaken ourselves and learn how this pandemic has attacked the world and at the moment every corner in this world is looking to strengthen their health services. It will be sad for this august assembly to recommend reallocation from the hospitals to the central ministry,” She stated.
According to her, reallocating resources from hospitals to the ministry is a disadvantage to the health sector when they needed an amount of D200, 000,000 for drugs and dressing.
Meanwhile, she said “look at development budget for example health, we signed a protocol which said that every budget must allocate 15% and we allocated 8% and that 8% most of it goes to recurrent but not development. How do we expect to have a healthy nation if we are not prepared to invest in developing our health facilities? She asked.
Meanwhile, she said: “We established this Ministry of Women Affairs and only 0.39% has been allocated to this Ministry when we have over 60% of women in this country and urged the august assembly to give more them. She said women are the builder of every nation and if they are empowered is like they empowered the whole nation.
“We need to strengthen ourselves within and covid-19 had though us that we can work in this country without moving an inch,” she added.