Archipelago Of Limbo

Dr E was teaching my group how to use the otoscope — when examining the right ear, move to the right side of the patient; maneuver the otoscope in your right hand like you would holding a pen; don’t spread your thighs in front of the patient — when, as he often did, broke into one of his stories. This one was about how he used to go home and pack the treats his mother’s faithful congregation brought to their house, a benevolence extended in honour of her pastoral duties, and how he would eat all of them because she’s diabetic. Very foolish Nigerians, he said, shaking his head, wanting other people to lead them to God when they can find God on their own.

Sometimes I am entranced by the stories; other times, I want to run from the hot clinic, from the desperate patients, into the safe cocoon of my room where nothing asks anything of me.

(While this article isn’t about Dr E, the core of it begins in one of his stories, so bear with me.)

‎In another story, he spoke about his days as a medical student. I spent seven years in medical school, he said, I once stood in these same clinics. And unlike other doctors — who speak to us with tired, begrudging patience about optimism, about making the best of the situation (the situation being that by 2028, our supposed graduation year, my set would have spent nine years in school, almost a decade) — Dr E sympathized with us. He made intelligent comments about the deplorable state of the hospital and the country. He didn’t serve us the familiar sermon of I survived the system, you should find a way to survive it too, plated neatly and passed off as wisdom. He understood the root of our frustration, the abyss this teaching hospital has thrown its students into, where we keep falling, without a saviour in sight. 

‎By mid-2026, four sets of medical students would have been living in Alexander Brown Hall, Catholic Hostel, and rented apartments along UCH axis, an archipelago of limbo, shaped by an unstable academic calendar and held together by the maddening grief of time lost. In 2026, there’s no graduating set. The supposed graduating set, the 2k23, would be staring at their eight years in school, still chasing procedures to fill their logbooks with the signatures of SRs and Consultants they are praying to be free of soon, still sitting in groups at Prestige after exhausting days in the clinic, still fixing tutorials and counting the days to graduation.

‎The question that rakes through my mind, that makes it sting with imploding anger, is this: why do students keep coming to a college that refuses to push students out faster than it gulps them in? Why do they want to be trained in a college that admits more students than the rooms in its hostel can accommodate? 

‎My sister graduated from the University of Ibadan, and it felt only natural that I wanted to go there too. I chose UI out of proximity, out of familiarity, and fortunately or unfortunately, I got admission to study Dentistry on the second try. No one warned me about the strikes, the forever-changing academic calendar, and the repeated postings. I mean, I knew about ASUU strikes; I read about them on my phone and in my father’s PUNCH newspapers. I knew the faces behind the stories too: Professor Ogunyemi, Professor Osodeke, the perpetually worn glasses that seemed fused behind his ears, as dogged as his resistance to the federal government. 

‎But nobody warned me about JOHESU strike, MDCAN strike, NARDS strike, about the particular way strikes plagued the clinical arm of medical training. In my preclinical years, I was told I didn’t need to worry, that I would pass through my clinical years unscathed. All I had to do was attend lectures, clinics, and other activities I was meant to do, with the earnest rigour of someone who understands how hard her parents are working to pay her fees, how much they are denying themselves so their daughter can add the prefix Dr. to her name.

No one warned me about these strikes that have come to define my clinical years.

And the question comes in another form: are the students filling JAMB forms year after year, still choosing the University of Ibadan as their first choice to study Medicine and Surgery, to study Dentistry, unaware of this crisis in the clinical arm of the courses they so desperately want? 

There is only one reasonable answer to these questions. Some are not aware. They are drawn by reputation, others by inheritance (siblings already in the system), and the rest by affordability. Those who are aware are drawn by the promise that endurance will be rewarded, and again by affordability and inheritance. 

And they keep coming, into the island of deferred exit where leaving is harder than entering. 

Bello Taiwo 

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