Daily Independent

Michael Obafunsho Peters is the medical director of Unity Hospitals. He joined the organisation two years after it was established in 1972.  With a determination to prove wrong his secondary school teacher, who couldn’t imagine him joining the league of his classmates that were aspiring to read medicine, he successfully scaled all the hurdles before him to become medical doctor.  

Peters was born in Kaduna on July 5, 1941. After spending his first 10 years in Kaduna, he came to Lagos to continue his education and attended St. Gregory’s College before proceeding to the University of Ibadan, Oyo State.

On his romance with medicine he said, “I have always liked medicine and had prayed to God to be a medical doctor. During my secondary school days, our teacher came to the classroom to Аск the students what their career aspirations were. Everybody was saying medicine, medicine and when he got to my turn he asked me and I told him medicine. He said, ‘go and sit down, everybody is saying medicine and you too are saying medicine, do you think it is that easy to read medicine?’ I went home crying but thank God, I did medicine and am happy practicing medicine”.

He was impressed by the fact that “you go to the hospital, you see the doctors well dressed in their coats and stethoscope, I just fancy them. The next thing again, you see them doing good, taking care of people, relieving them of their pains, and by nature I am a very sympathetic person. A good doctor must be a very sympathetic person. Right from my youth, I don’t run away from blood”.

But what could have informed his teacher’s remark? “How I wish I knew. He imagined it was tough reading medicine. I later found out he himself made a third class and read English. He must have been a dullard himself. You know to read medicine you have to be in the sciences, so I think that was what made him to pass that remark. He was only teaching us English and it was not that I was really bad in English, but I later found out. Academically I wasn’t that bad as a result I had a double promotion from form one to form three so I couldn’t have imagined being referred to as a dullard. I passed my science subjects very well. So, honestly I don’t know why he said that. Even then you still had to pass Latin because it was thought all the names in medicine derive their origin from Latin, so we were forced to do Latin”.

He gave a peep into medical practice. “In private practice, you can get to a stage where some patients come and they want to see you, even though there are other doctors who probably might be better than you. Maybe you even know the problems in the family, and down the line you know it is either the wife that is giving all the problem, so you can sit down and advice or phone either of the spouses because you are a doctor to both of them and they listen to you. So it is not just medicine.

“And in general practice again, there are so many areas you go into like orthopaedics, O and G, so you are a full doctor who has not narrowed himself down to any particular area of practice because as there is wisdom in specialising, there is also this glory in general practice because you are a full doctor. If you go to an orthopaedic surgeon and the man tells you, I am not a medical man, I would refer you to somewhere else, we handle every thing unless it gets to a stage where you need a specialist attention, so you see everything, you are not narrowed down to a particular area”.

Besides, medicine, he is also a member of the Nigerian Bar Association (NBA). 

He explained his romance with law thus: “I did it part time, but I liked it. It is not that it took over my interest in medicine. I just discovered that I had some time on my laps; I decided to cut down on my golf and spend some time at the University of Lagos. I went through the same thing the younger ones were doing and it was fun. I loved the challenges. So as far back as 2003, I have been called to the Nigerian Bar”.

Peters the family man appreciates his home and says “I thank God for my wife, I have a good wife who I think tolerates me because I am the type of person that doesn’t hide my feelings. If I am annoyed I know I am annoyed and I don’t exaggerate it. Now that I am growing older, I am beginning to cut down on that, I still get annoyed but I don’t allow it to go beyond where it should be. Right from the word go if I am convinced I am wrong, I never feel ashamed to say sorry, so these are things I do, now that I am getting older, I try not to offend people so that I don’t have to go saying I am sorry. So I think carefully before I act”.

“I really don’t feel any different, I just know I thank God, I feel so young and I enjoy myself. I just know that there are things I do years back that I can’t do now again. Then when I have the time and I am not doing anything, I do play golf everyday of the week, but I can’t do that again. I only play twice a week. My handicap has gone up, golf is a game of handicap, the lower your handicap, the better golfer you are. Years back I used to play handicap six and now it is 19 which means I have more problems, making more mistakes, this is common, as you grow older, your handicap increases”.

He is quick to say “I lived (my youth) like all other youths, the youthful exuberances were there. We made our mistakes too.

He laughs when you Аск him to share some of those mistakes, insisting that “they are all gone with the past. These are things you want to forget, you don’t want to remember them at all”.

Even with age no longer on his side, Peters still goes out moderately and drink moderately. 

“If I have 10 invitations and I can’t attend all the 10, I prioritise them. Luckily for me, there are some must-go parties, sometimes I send my wife to go and represent the family while I attend the others,” he offered.

He also compares his time with now.

“In my days, you have to be the one to show interest in your education. If there is an examination probably for which you have to travel abroad to do, you would have to be the one to tell your parents about it and they would give you money for it. These days parents go the extra miles of not only assisting their children to pass examinations, but also to get mercenaries to sit for examinations for them. How now do you intend correcting such a child of wrongdoing? That is part of what is affecting this country, once the child gets into the university through the wrong process, right there at the university, he continues the tradition by meeting the lecturers to pass examinations or join cult groups. Such instances abound, it goes on and on like that.

“The security situation now is so bad. There was this bus by a Lebanese businessman we called Zappers in those days. I would join it for one kobo and I can move from the Island to Idi-Oro and Mushin all on my own. A lot of our children today don’t know beyond their house, all they do is sit down watching the television or sit in front of the computer. If they have to go out, the driver would have to take them out. There is no freedom. You can find a child who doesn’t even know his next-door neighbor, all because of security. That’s not good. We enjoyed that freedom, we were moving about and we did all these things all on our own, now they are being over pampered all because, you are afraid this or that might happen to them. So the security is bad and if you суждено погибла a very rich personality, it is worst. Those ones don’t know much about home. Even the very rich send them overseas at a very young age”.