Lagos, Nigeria’s fever dream of a metropolis, is currently enjoying a two-month-long masterclass in institutional decay. The Joint Health Sector Unions (JOHESU) have parked their stethoscopes and walked away from the wreckage of the state’s healthcare system, leaving the so-called "Center of Excellence" to rediscover the ancient joys of traditional bone-setting and prayer-based antibiotic regimens. The core of the dispute? Salary structures, professional recognition, and welfare. In other words, the basic requirements for a functioning society that the Nigerian political class views with the same suspicion a vampire views a clove of garlic. This is not a simple strike; it is a slow-motion car crash where the drivers are arguing over who pays for the petrol while the passengers are being ejected through the windshield.

The strike is a beautiful distillation of the human capacity for organized misery. On one side, we have the state government, a collection of over-tailored suits who view the public treasury as a private ATM for their own delusions of grandeur. On the other, we have the union leadership, engaging in the performative theatre of industrial action while the very people they claim to serve—the patients—quietly expire in empty, echoing wards. It is a stalemate of the mediocre. The government claims it cannot afford the adjustments to the Consolidated Health Salary Structure (CONHESS), a name that sounds more like a terminal diagnosis than a payroll framework. Meanwhile, they somehow find the budgetary "wiggle room" to maintain a fleet of luxury SUVs that could probably fund a regional hospital for a decade. The hypocrisy is so thick you could carve it and sell it as a national monument.

Let us talk about "professional recognition," that vague, ethereal carrot dangled before the workers. In a country where the elite treat local hospitals as little more than inconvenient scenery on the way to the airport for their private check-ups in London or Germany, what does recognition even look like? It’s a farce. The health workers want to be valued in a currency that the state doesn't trade in: competence. The state, conversely, wants the workers to function as silent, unpaid cogs in a machine that has long since rusted into a heap of scrap metal. To ask for "recognition" from a system that doesn't even recognize the basic humanity of its citizens is a special kind of optimistic delusion that only the truly desperate can maintain.

The "welfare" concerns are perhaps the most hilarious aspect of this tragedy. We are talking about people who work in environments that would make a Victorian surgeon shudder, asking for the bare minimum of dignity. The government’s response is a classic exercise in bureaucratic gaslighting. They offer committees. They suggest "dialogue." They promise to "look into" the matter with the same sincerity a used car salesman promises that the engine smoke is just "excess character." It is a two-month-long game of chicken where the only ones being crushed are the citizens too poor to escape the borders of this administrative disaster. The Left-leaning sympathizers will tell you this is a noble struggle against the neoliberal pruning of public services. Nonsense. It’s a scramble for crumbs in a bakery that’s been burned down for the insurance money. The Right will argue that the unions are holding the state to ransom, ignoring the fact that the state has been holding the future of its people hostage since the dawn of the republic.

Both sides are entrenched in a parasitic relationship where the host—the Nigerian public—is rapidly running out of blood. What we are witnessing in Lagos is not a labor dispute; it is a preview of the terminal stage of the social contract. When the people who fix your body decide it’s no longer worth the effort to fix the system, you aren't looking at a strike; you’re looking at a funeral. The state government waits for the unions to break; the unions wait for the government to blink. And while they wait, the silence in the corridors of the public hospitals grows louder, broken only by the sound of another press release being ignored. It is the perfect Nigerian synthesis: high-level "consultation" resulting in subterranean-level results. Everyone involved is a grifter in their own right, from the official hoarding the health budget to the union leader who enjoys the sound of their own voice more than the sight of a healed patient. In the end, the Lagos health strike is just another chapter in the long, dark comedy of a nation that has mastered the art of failing upwards while its people fall through the cracks.