By Habeeb Ibrahim
Nigeria has recorded its first tele-robotic surgery, with a surgeon in Mowe, Ogun State, remotely operating on a kidney cancer patient in Abuja, more than 500 kilometres away.
The landmark procedure was performed at Redeemer’s Health Village in collaboration with RoboMed Global.
The surgery, a robot-assisted right radical nephrectomy, involved the removal of a cancerous kidney.
But the major breakthrough was not only the use of a surgical robot.
The surgeon was not in the same hospital as the patient.
Instead, the operation was controlled remotely from Mowe while the patient was in Abuja, demonstrating the use of telecommunications technology to connect surgical expertise across locations.
The development marks a new stage in Nigeria’s adoption of robotic surgery, moving beyond procedures where surgeons and patients are physically in the same facility.
Nigeria had previously begun deploying robotic-assisted surgical systems, including the Toumai robotic platform commissioned at Nisa Premier Hospital in Abuja in 2025.
The latest procedure, however, introduces a different possibility: a specialist surgeon could potentially operate on a patient in another city without travelling to the hospital where the patient is being treated.
For a country where access to highly specialised medical care is often concentrated in major urban centres, the technology could open new possibilities for connecting patients with specialist surgeons across geographical boundaries.
The first tele-robotic surgery therefore represents more than another robotic procedure in Nigeria. It marks the country’s entry into remote surgery, where distance between surgeon and patient is no longer necessarily a barrier to a complex operation.
