President of the National Association of Resident Doctors (NARD), Dr. Jibril Abdullahi, has passed a vote of no confidence in the current Minister of Health, Professor Onyebuchi Chukwu, and his Labour and Productivity counterpart, Mr. Chukwuemeka Wogu, blaming the duo for the government’s failure to fulfill its past promises to them. “I want people to understand one thing, the minister of health and the minister of labour, we don’t trust them; because this is not the first time my association is engaging with them. They made promises but they have failed in seeing that the government fulfill those promises”, Dr. Abdullahi said yesterday in an exclusive interview with our reporter. The doctors’ strike, which started on the 1st of this month, entered its third week today following the failure of the government and the NARD to resolve the lingering dispute. There were almost two weeks ago indications that the doctors would suspend the strike action after series of meetings with the ministers and other top government officials, but this did not materialise. The NARD president, while speaking to our reporter in a telephone interview, listed the major reasons why the association continued with the strike, and why it may not call it off until the government fulfills its pledges to them. “Am sure people are interested in knowing the reasons why we are on strike. There are many reasons, but prominently, we have an issue, in the first phase, when nine hospitals recruited and in these nine hospitals, six are teaching hospitals where you have house officers and medical graduates who are just doing their compulsory one year pre-registration internship. In those six hospitals, when they started the new system in June, the house officers were not paid (salaries) in June, July and August. “The current federal government’s new payment system whereby hospitals are enrolled into a platform, and subsequently all the payment of their staff is directly from the Central Bank, resulted in the non-payment of the house officers”, he stressed. He added that the association met with the government representatives on July 31, and government promised to pay up by the end of August but failed to do so. He added that, “Our umbrella body, that is Nigerian Medical Association (NMA), had issued an ultimatum to the government in August to September. The government called a meeting in the next few days; my association is an affiliate of the NMA; we were at that meeting as an observer and they (government) also promised us that they will pay those young men by the middle of September, but they did not”. According to Dr. Abdullahi, “there are resident doctors who have also not been paid their salaries since June, and there are those who were under paid since June. When the programme started in June we met the government and discussed on this new payroll system. From the way and manner the verification was conducted, it was troublesome. We advised them to stop the recruitment of the second phase and look at those hospitals they already recruited, identified and solve the problem before recruiting for other centres, but the government did not do that”. He said, apart from the issue of payment, huge amounts of money are being spent for overseas medical trips due to the poor and insufficient medical facilities in public hospitals across the country, stressing that one of the demands of the NARD is for government to improve the standard of the health sector for easy access to health care services for the poor and middle-income earners in the country
Posted on: Tue, 15 Oct 2013 07:11:20 +0000
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