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I’d love to be part of Nigeria’s developmental story – Dr Ogechika Alozie

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November 01, (THEWILL) – Nigerian/American infectious disease expert, Dr Ogechika Alozie, shares his dream to see the health sector in Nigeria thrive, in this interview with IVORY UKONU

Dr Ogechika Alozie
Dr Ogechika Alozie

What is it like as a Nigerian physician practising in the USA?

I think it’s a little bit different. I moved to the United States in 2002 after finishing medical school at the University of Benin. Just trying to get into the medical programme was difficult because I had to do a lot of examinations. The standard of care in the United States makes the whole process difficult. I think once you get established as a a doctor, everyone treats you accordingly. I think being a Nigerian makes you have expectations. There are pros and cons to it, but it has been a blessing especially being able to provide for my family by coming here and I won’t change it for the world.

Glo

Judging by the calibre of news outlets that seek your opinion on medical issues, you are obviously one of the most sought-after physicians. How were you able to achieve this feat?

I think it’s a lot of things. You have to take opportunities as they present themselves to you. If you don’t, you will miss out on a lot of things. I remember being afraid, as a student and a fellow, to make presentations, but one day, someone said to me right before I was to make a presentation: “Hey, what are you worried about? Even if there’s an expert in the room as of that time you’re talking, you’re the most qualified person in the room because you’ve done the research the night before. So, own it, put it in your chest and go with it.”

And I think that sort of helped me mentally and then I was sort of blessed or lucky early on in my career to be approached by a couple of organisations that wanted me to speak for them to patients. I am very passionate about patient care in the HIV and Hepatitis C space. So I was able to, for many years, talk probably two to five times a month to patients and I used that to really own my skills and understand how to engage with people and how to be dynamic. Part of it was just the Nigerian in me. I used to dodge questions, but I learnt how to take a question, flip it, manipulate it and spit it back so that I give part of the answer but not all of the answer. I think that has really been it and people also appreciate it if you are blunt, direct and you are able to synthesize. Overtime, I have learnt how to take complex things, distill them into simple things for people to understand.

What has been your experience with racism in a country that claims to be a free nation but still has an issue with racism?

I think one of the things that have to be said is that I grew up in the United States. I moved to the US when I was four months-old. My father was a PhD student until he passed away when I was four and I lived there until I turned 16 before my mom sent me back to Federal Government College, Okigwe. And so when I was growing up in Minnesota, I didn’t realise or feel racism per say. Obviously, there were kids in school that would call me a nigga and all sort of things, but you deal with that as a man or a young boy. You fight and you move on. As I returned as an adult, it was not as blatant as it used to be and I think one thing that people don’t realise is that one’s educational status and financial ability protects one from certain things. Nobody is coming up to me and calling me a nigga. Nobody is outright and directly being racist to me, but there are the subtle things, like being passed over for certain positions or the way people approach you, or sometimes patients thinking that you are a nurse or a garbage collector, even though you’re wearing your white scrub. They have probably never seen a black doctor before. Another thing is about where you live. If you live in a black neighborhood, you are not affected by race day-to-day. If you live in a predominantly white neighborhood that is affluent, you may not be affected day-to-day by it. However, it’s the subtleness of not being invited to dinner parties or maybe your kids don’t get to play with other kids as much. But I don’t think that racism goes away. I will say that the United State is much less racist than it used to be, but then if you’re not white, you have to come to terms with it quickly or it will affect not only the way you grow, live, learn and love but also your professional opportunities. I think it’s important for people to sort of walk into that with both eyes wide open.

Why did you leave Nigeria?

Opportunities! I could barely get a house job after I finished from the University of Benin. I had to do a programme where they didn’t pay me for four years and then I went for youth service in Ado-Ekiti. That was nice because it gave me the opportunity to prepare to leave the country. Nigeria doesn’t afford you as many opportunities as you need. But I got the opportunity, passed my exams, trained to become a specialist and an expert in my field and I am able to take care of my family. I think at the end of the day that’s what everybody wants. Do we want Nigeria to be better? Absolutely. Do we want to have opportunities to improve Nigeria? Absolutely. Does Nigeria afford you those opportunities without having to do an immense amount of work that you don’t have to do in another country? Absolutely not. People leave not because one country is better than another, but because of opportunities.

What do you make of the Federal Government’s lackadaisical attitude towards the health sector and the brain drain?

Until the government realises that health is wealth and makes an investment in health care, medical practitioners are going to continue to leave and the country will lose its best and brightest. Nobody that has opportunities to leave and improve themselves stays in an environment that is wallowing or decrepit or breaking down. The reality is that people who have the means, access and resources leave the country for medical care. It is unfortunate that sometimes when I engage with some of my colleagues about basic clinical concepts, you can tell that they’re not up to speed and that is just disappointing. It’s not just the health care sector, the government and private industries have to invest in technology because I truly believe that is the only way Nigeria will come out of this. Oil is not going to save us. In fact, I think oil has destroyed us. When the people at the top don’t trust the system, they help to destroy the system. We need new leadership. I don’t know where that leadership will come from, but we need new and different thinkers that think about Nigeria as a cohesive entity and are willingly to invest in it. When a third to a quarter to a half of our money disappears into other people’s coffers and foreign bank accounts, how do you want to account for growth?

You are an expert in infectious disease. What was the attraction?

I wanted to be a cardiologist or a sports medicine physician. When I got to Minnesota in 2002 and I started doing my masters in public health in cardiovascular epidemiology, it just didn’t speak to me, I didn’t enjoy it and it just felt mundane. I went through a particular summer where I didn’t have a job and I was doing some odd jobs and my mom called to tell me that one of my aunties contracted HIV. She began to ask me a series of questions like; What do I have to do? Do I stop sleeping in the house? Do I get new plates? Do I do this or that? I don’t know what it was, but my mom was a PhD holder from the University of Benin and she was asking me these questions and telling me about the stigma ……. It just sort of sparked a fire in me while trying to help her find medications, and help her understand it better. I was all of a sudden intrigued by it and so that became my passion and my focus, specifically around the space of HIV and that’s what I have been doing ever since.

How significant is your work as an infectious disease expert viz a viz corona virus?

I don’t know if it’s significant. I didn’t help create any of the vaccines like other Nigerian countrymen have done. Kudos to them, but I hope what my gift has been to my community at least, is being able to give them straight, simple, fast concept around COVID-19: how to stay safe, how to think about coronavirus for themselves, their loved ones or children and how to think about the vaccine, having been a huge proponent of vaccines since they became available. I think, as an infectious disease physician, that it is just part of my role to educate the community about prevention and infectious diseases and how we can treat it and so hopefully I have been able to do a little bit of that.

What is it like owning your own private practice in Texas?

It’s a challenge and a blessing, but I think the blessing is I don’t have a boss. I am my own boss, I am the CEO of both Southwest Viral Medicine and Sunset ID Care. We are merging soon to be called Sunset West. I have always been an entrepreneurial being, someone that sort of pushes the envelope and someone that looks at things creatively. For me, it has been a blessing. I have about 15 staff that are focused on HIV and Hepatitis C and health care. So, it has just really been a blessing. I have taken a lot of knowledge in education from multiple employers that I have had over the years, but I think this is just the right space for me to be and I am blessed to be in it.

You have won quite a few awards for your works as an infectious disease expert. Which is the most significant?

Wow! I mean two of them; one will be the year I won Best Physician in the city which I won via online voting. It was sort of exciting that I didn’t even know I was relevant and people knew about the practice. I think that sort of helped to catapult the practice and helped my team really see that they were doing great work. The El Paso Physician Association also gave me an award some years ago for most innovative practice and that really touched me because it was what I was trying to do, both at the university and when I was trying to do my private practice. Being noticed and getting honoured was really a blessing.

What has been most challenging about your work as an infectious disease expert?

You know the infectious diseases I deal with are HIV and Hepatitis C specifically. A lot of stigma is attached to them. Being a heterosexual physician in a field that primarily affects MSM (Men Having Sex With Men) or gay men in the United States has always been interesting. Either the MSM population or community doesn’t think you’re good enough because you’re not MSM or people that are none MSM wonder why are you doing this and wonder if you are a closeted gay. Also getting adequate resources is difficult. Up until Covid-19 emerged, infectious diseases never got a lot of resources. It was always a challenge, but it’s worth it because I enjoy what I do.

You gave a TedX-El Paso talk titled ‘The Digital Immigrant’ a few years ago. What was it all about?

As an immigrant, when you come to a new country and you don’t understand their customs and their ways, you have to figure things out and then you eventually understand it. I realised that in health care and in technology, we have a lot of immigrants, people that are born in other countries that don’t have technology. People that are old or the baby boomers, as they are called, didn’t grow up with technology as opposed to my children and the younger generation that grew up with technology. They’re tied to their phones, tablets and the Internet and that’s the world they are in. That is why Instagram, Snapchat and everything else has flourished. So the TedX on the digital immigrant was showing the connection between how you can take somebody as an immigrant, naturalise them and make them more comfortable in a technology-driven society and in doing so, enhance their health care experience. I think that really becomes sort of germane to Nigeria. We don’t potentially need to keep all the people that want to be physicians in the country, but if the technology and infrastructural backbone is appropriate and enhanced, they can do telemedicine visits. I think that’s how we allow people in the Diaspora to give back to Nigeria without necessarily having to come to Nigeria, by enabling that technology and I think that is a worthwhile investment.

What is it about your growing up years that has shaped you to become the person you are today?

I would say first of all, being a student at the Federal Government College Okigwe. That experience and realising that if you can survive that, you can survive anything. I just think the Nigerian experience prepares you for when you go someplace that things are not as difficult. Where there is constant light, constant water, where you can get access to resources easily and consistently, it makes it easier for you to grow and thrive. And then I think part of it too is growing up poor, as an only child whose father died at four. My mom did her best to raise me as best as she could. So, when she saw that I was going in a different direction she sent me back to Nigeria where I lived with my father’s family in Owerri. So, I grew up always having that drive to do better.

What would you say has been your greatest achievement in life so far?

I mean coming out of poverty is one of my biggest achievements and the fact that I survived Nigeria after not growing up there, the fact that I was able to use that growth and come to the United States and still achieve some of the things I have achieved. If somebody had told me when I was 14, 15, 16 years that I would be at this level or this stage, I would have laughed or maybe cried and sometimes I look back now and say, “Hey it has been an amazing journey.” I will turn 50 next year and I hope the next 20 or 30 years will be great. I mean I don’t want to work for 30 years, but I want to give at least another 10 to 15 years of productive education, learning and knowledge and just growing. Also, having children is a blessing, but while they are not my achievement per say, I still look forward to seeing them grow into this world and into this global village that we have, I just want to continue to try to give back and help people as much as I can. And at the end of the day, I will just thank God and pray that I can make it day by day.

Would you accept an invitation return to Nigeria to help, say in the Ministry of Health?

I will actually happily and immediately accept it. I think that I would hope I have a role to play and I would hope I bring a different vision. Maybe that’s the delusion on my part but I just feel as if we need some sort of new leadership that thinks about the country differently. It’s a complicated and huge country but if I was asked to play a role, I will definitely do that because I think I have a skill set both from a communication standpoint and an intellectual standpoint and the training that I have received could be of benefit. It may not be as a minister or as a special adviser, whatever it is, I would love to play a role in the Nigerian developmental story.

Nigeria celebrated its 61st independence anniversary in October. What is your wish for the country as a whole and the health sector in particular?

Nigeria as a whole I think has to come to terms with themselves. Nigeria sometimes feels like that child who has so much promise and has been hyped up by doting parents, who spoils the child. Having squandered everything he was given, the child has sort of come to a crossroads. Oil isn’t going to last forever. We see this as Saudi Arabia and some of the other OPEC nations have begun to move away from oil and into sustainable resources. We need to figure ourselves out as a country. What are we proud of? What do we have to offer not just to the world, but also to ourselves? How do we enhance the generation of children and people in this country that are yearning to do better? I truly think that technology is one of those things that is the way out. We need to invest in 5G and fibre technology that allows everybody in Nigeria affordable access to technology because technology opens the world up for them in terms of education, business and finance. When I think about the medical sector, I think we need to truly put money into a full-fledged payment system, something like the National Health Service, that allows people that have the means to do private insurance and then actually modernise our health care system. Our hospitals are falling apart, we really need to put equipment in them and get on a technological footprint. We also need to train the upcoming generations of physicians accordingly.

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