There is a certain kind of frustration that builds slowly. It starts with a few extra minutes, then an hour, then another.
The air moves lazily around the room. Seven students sit scattered across a waiting room built for thirty, each staring at their phones, each having already been there for over two hours. No one is being called. Behind the front desk, a nurse shuffles some papers, then sets them back down. The room is quiet in the manner that slowly drives you over the edge.
This is Jaja, the University Health Services Clinic, on a regular Tuesday afternoon. What should have been a quick visit stretches into nearly four hours, despite only a handful of patients being present. It is not even just about the delay. It is about how so little happens in so much time.
That Tuesday is not an isolated incident. On a separate Friday, at 12:20 PM, twelve people sit scattered across the same waiting area—again, a fraction of what the room could hold. And yet, in the corner, a 400-level Agronomy student has been waiting since 9:50 AM. Her consultation is not yet done.
“The last time I came,” she says, adjusting in her seat, “I arrived at ten in the morning and left at seven in the evening.”
Nine hours. For a clinic visit.
Jaja is meant to be the first and most accessible point of medical contact for students on campus, the quickest option when illness strikes during school hours. For many, it is the only option. But experiences like these raise a pointed question about how effectively it is fulfilling that role, and who, if anyone, is paying attention.
A Pattern No One Is Talking About
On a previous visit, a student, who asked to remain anonymous, presented with respiratory symptoms at around 10:00 AM and didn’t leave until 5:00PM. More than half of this time, he said, was spent waiting to see the doctor.
“There’s a waiting time because there are many patients and few doctors,” he said. “Sometimes the doctors aren’t available, and that could be for a number of reasons.” When asked what he thought the clinic could do to improve, he was blunt. “I don’t think there’s any agenda towards reducing the waiting time.”
Hawau, a student, has visited Jaja multiple times across two academic sessions. Last session, she arrived around 12 PM and did not leave until past 5. This session, she came in for a leg injury at around 4 PM and left at 8. The longest part of each visit, she says, was always waiting for the doctor, not the nurses, who took her vitals and submitted her name promptly.
The consequences of one of those waits extended well past the clinic walls. “I left in the night, almost 9 PM,” she recalls, “and it was really hard getting a tricycle back to my hostel from the school gate because most of the riders were done for the day.” She had been sitting for hours with an injury that was still causing her pain.
A mother who brought her daughter in for a hand injury arrived just after 10 AM and was not done until 1 PM. Three hours for what she had hoped would be a quick visit. She is not a student; the clinic’s waiting problem, it turns out, does not discriminate.
The stories differ, but the number keeps returning: four hours.
One Doctor, Two Roles
Beneath the surface of these long waits lies a more alarming reality: on multiple occasions, the clinic has appeared to operate with a single doctor managing everything at once.
On one visit, this reporter was told by a nurse at the front desk that the delay was because the doctor on duty was needed in the emergency room. On a completely separate visit, Hawau overheard a member of staff confirm the same thing: one doctor handling both consultations and emergencies simultaneously. Faced with an overwhelming queue and that knowledge, she made the only logical decision she could—she left and came back the following day.
“The doctors are too few,” she said simply. “They should employ more.”
That statement is a sentiment that runs through every conversation had for this article. The problem is not with the patients; no one is asking for too much. The clinic is simply offering too little.
When Low Volume Is No Comfort
One might expect that a quieter day at the clinic would mean a shorter wait. This reporter’s own visits on three separate occasions, when no more than ten to eleven patients were present, suggest otherwise. The waiting time remained disproportionately long regardless of how few people were in the room.
That is the detail that should concern the university most. A long queue can, in some circumstances, justify a long wait. But when the chairs are half empty, and students are still sitting for hours, the problem is no longer about volume. It is perhaps about process, staffing, and most troublingly, priority.
The Ones Who Stop Coming
For many students, an exit from Jaja does not lead back to their hostels. It leads somewhere else entirely.
“I go to a pharmacy where I state my illness and drugs are prescribed to address it,” Emmanuel, 200L, wrote. That is a sentence worth sitting with. A pharmacist merely recommending medication is not the same as a doctor making a diagnosis, but when the alternative is hours in a waiting room, the distinction begins to feel academic.
Others do not even make it through the wait. “I waited for hours. There was no doctor present that day. I was terribly ill and yet wasn’t attended to,” another student wrote. “I had to go to the chemist.”
One student has simply found a workaround: arriving before the crowd. “Less than an hour,” they wrote of their wait time. “I always go early.” But we should not require a complex strategy to receive basic healthcare. Sick people should not have to “plan” a hospital visit the way they plan for an examination.
These are not isolated decisions. They are a pattern and a warning. A student managing their own illness at a pharmacy counter is not a student being served by their university’s health system. They are a student the system has quietly lost.
What Needs To Change
The solutions are neither complicated nor abstract. More doctors on rotation, particularly during peak hours, would immediately reduce the pressure on a single physician pulled between consultations and emergencies. A clearer, visible queuing system would reduce the sense of arbitrariness that makes the wait feel even longer. These are not extraordinary demands. They are the bare minimum expectations of any functioning health facility.
After all, the hours lost in Jaja’s waiting room are not abstract either. They are lectures missed, assignments delayed, and meals skipped by students who came in expecting to be back before noon. They are a student with a leg injury struggling to find transport home in the dark. They are a mother losing half her day to bring her child in for a hand wound. And they are, perhaps most damagingly, a quiet message sent to every student who walks through those doors: that their time does not matter, and that next time, it might simply be easier not to come at all.
A clinic that students learn to avoid is not a functioning clinic. It is a last resort, and a last resort that takes seven hours is, for many, no resort at all.
Ayomide Bello
