TG Omori reveals N1 m salary still can’t fund dialysis

I just finished listening to TG Omori’s interview on the Afropolitan podcast and my heart went heavy. The video director, known for his viral clips, opened up about his kidney failure battle and dropped a brutal truth: even a N1 million monthly salary is far from enough to keep the dialysis machine humming.

The numbers speak for themselves. If you earn N1 m a month, you’re staring at a shortfall of N900,000 every single month. How many Nigerians can afford to dip into savings, sell assets, or borrow at sky‑high interest just to stay alive? And why is a life‑saving service priced like a luxury?

We keep hearing politicians promise free health care, yet the reality on the ground is a maze of out‑of‑pocket expenses. E be like say una don carry una destiny throway for gutter when the system forces us to choose between feeding the family and paying for a life‑supporting treatment. The private dialysis centres operate on a profit model that mirrors the same colonial extraction we decry in oil and minerals.

So what now? Should we keep praying for a miracle from abroad, or start demanding a national dialysis fund backed by progressive taxation and transparent governance? Can the creative community rally, like TG Omori did, to push for local manufacturing of dialysis machines to slash costs?

I’m calling on every member of AprokoNation: share your thoughts, your ideas, and your own experiences with health‑care financing. Let’s turn this painful revelation into a collective demand for affordable, home‑grown solutions. Na who go step up?

Premise 1 – Health‑care financing in Nigeria remains fundamentally under‑resourced.
Since independence, our federal budget has allocated on average less than 5 % of total expenditure to health (World Bank, 2022). The 2004 National Health Act promised universal coverage, yet implementation has been piecemeal. Consequently, tertiary hospitals rely heavily on out‑of‑pocket payments, a legacy of the 1990s structural adjustment era when user fees were introduced to plug fiscal gaps.

Premise 2 – The cost structure of dialysis reflects both imported technology and the absence of a national subsidy.
Dialysis machines, consumables and recombinant erythropoietin are largely sourced from Europe or China. Without a bulk‑purchase framework, prices cascade down to the patient. Compare this with the 1970s renal transplant programme at University College Hospital, Ibadan, which was government‑funded and free for civil servants—a model that vanished after the 1986 IMF–World Bank conditionalities forced the abandonment of free‑care schemes.

Premise 3 – A ₦1 million monthly salary is already a “middle‑class” benchmark in Lagos, yet it cannot bridge the ₦1.9 million dialysis bill.
The table you posted shows a shortfall of ₦900 000 per month, equivalent to roughly 75 % of the median household disposable income (National Bureau of Statistics, 2024). To sustain such a deficit, families must liquidate assets, draw on informal loans at 30 %‑plus annual rates, or fall into debt traps—outcomes that echo the “medical poverty trap” documented by Ogbuoji (2019).

Conclusion – Structural reform, not charitable appeals, is required.

1. National Dialysis Fund – a levy on payrolls (e.g., 0.5 % of gross salary) pooled to subsidise chronic renal replacement therapy.
2. Local production incentives – tax breaks for firms manufacturing dialyzers and consumables, reducing import dependence.
3. Integration into the National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS) – expanding coverage to include chronic kidney disease, as was done for hypertension in the 2016 pilot in Kano.

Until the state assumes responsibility, stories like TG Omori’s will remain tragic testimonies of a system that values profit over life. The policy window is open; it is up to legislators, professional bodies and civil society to turn rhetoric into concrete budgetary allocations.