EDITORIAL: The Twin-tragedy Of Nigerian Doctors' Strike And Mass Exodus

THE TWIN-TRAGEDY OF NIGERIAN DOCTORS' STRIKE AND MASS EXODUS

*PREMIUM TIMES calls on the Federal and State Governments to show respect to our doctors and other medical personnel.

The lingering strike by resident doctors and the simultaneous intent of many of them to leave the country for greener pastures abroad present a highly unfortunate twin-tragedy.

The latter, evident in the recruitment that was being conducted by the Saudi Arabian Ministry of Health, is the key reason why the former needs to be addressed with the required urgency. The reaction of the government, however, shows a more befuddling non-appreciation of the precarious state of health care delivery in Nigeria – one that some analysts believe deserves the declaration of a state of emergency.

Typical of its jackboot-like approach to issues of public interest, the reaction of the government’s gestapo unit – the State Security Service (SSS) – was to invade the recruitment venue at Sheraton Hotels in Abuja on Thursday August 26, forcefully dispersing the participants and arresting and detaining a journalist with the International Centre for Investigative Reporting (ICIR), Marcus Fatunde, for some time.

Is the panic reaction to the Saudi recruitment because the government is embarrassed by being mocked by its own joke? Perhaps, if we recall that the Minister of Labour and Productivity, Chris Ngige, paradoxically a medical doctor himself, has repeatedly boasted that Nigeria has enough doctors and that whoever among them wants to go abroad should feel free to do so.

This apparent misrepresentation of the state of the nation’s health care sector is flying in the face of the government; and from the perspective of its enlightened interest, the Saudi government chose the moment of Nigerian doctors’ disaffection with their government to dangle carrots before them. Obviously, the doctors who turned out in large numbers for the recruitment exercise prefer the carrot to the stick. They should not be blamed.

It is saddening that the current month-long strike action by members of the National Association of Resident Doctors (NARD) is the fourth within the past two years over the same issues of delayed or non-payment of salaries and allowances. NARD is also demanding the payment of COVID-19 treatment allowances in the absence of death-in-service insurance, having lost at least 19 of its members to the pandemic, while it is protesting the shortage of manpower in public hospitals.

At the root of the strike actions is government’s constant failure to honour the agreement voluntarily reached with NARD over its demands, a practice that seems to have acquired the status of ‘regular trade mark’, as the late Afrobeat musician, Fela Anikulapo-Kuti would have put it. As we are all aware, the same attitude towards the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) has caused paralysing strikes in our public universities.

No demand could be more justifiable or more reasonable than those being put forward by NARD. Yet instead of pursuing a negotiated settlement to its logical conclusion, the government embarked on the futile journey of issuing a succession of threats, including the application of the “no-work no-pay rule”, which unsurprisingly met with stiff resistance from the doctors. Government then headed to the National Industrial Court seeking an interim injunction restraining the striking doctors, as it continued to dance around the issues at stake.

In this regard, PREMIUM TIMES welcomes the decision of Justice John Targema of the National Industrial Court in Abuja not to grant the order and commends him for the order to the two parties – the federal government and the NARD – “to suspend all forms of hostilities”.

The commonsense interpretation that should have been given to the order by a government genuinely concerned about the welfare of its health workforce and that of the generality of Nigerians who are being subjected to hardship due to the strike, is acceptance that the