Doctors’ strike prompts more unrest over pay
More strikes loom over health care in Nigeria after Joint Health Sector Unions threatened industrial unrest if government fails to pay arrears accruing from adjusted pay grades by end of August.
The arrears come from agreement to allow healthworkers skip the 10th pay grade on consolidated health salary structure and adjustments made to salaries and allowances following negotiations in January.
JOHESU—which consists nurses, midwives, pharmacists, technologists and a host of health workers minus doctors— demanded federal government to expedite “action be releasing circular as they have done to NMA since January 2014 and the accrued arrears since January 2014 be paid to our members to avoid industrial action.”
In the first week of July when doctors went on strike, government agreed to put out at least three letters and a circular from the National Salaries, Incomes and Wages Commission to meet some of NMA’s 24 demands, insisting it had “met its own side” of agreements reached.
But that 10-hour meeting on July 3, a second meeting and further intervention by House of Representatives have failed to get striking doctors back to work.
Doctors want to be able to skip CONHESS 10 or have it abolished for all healthworkers, and the Head of Service is expected to consider the issue in the next three weeks.
But implementation on that is stalled by the government’s appeal on a National Industrial Court judgment, which prompted it to discontinue skipping but without affecting previous beneficiaries.
Further action on that was stalled again after Medical and Dental Consultants Association of Nigeria sought a restraining order stopping government from acting on that agreement, pending the National Industrial Court’s sitting by October 13.
But JOHESU argued against “pressure being mounted on government either to distort facts or suspend important existing circulars meant for other Health professionals to pacify the striking” doctors.
“Should such discrimination occur against other health professionals, situation in the health sector will become more complicated and uncontrollable,” said Yusuf Badmus, general secretary of National Association of Nigerian Nurses and Midwives, an affiliate of JOHESU.
In a communiqué jointly issued with the Assembly Of Health Professional Association last week, it condemned NMA and MDCAN for “embarking on strike simply because Federal Government agreed to implement legitimate agreements and memorandum of understanding between JOHESU/AHPA and Federal Government spanning between 2009 to date.”
Leadership of both JOHESU and AHPA reached a resolution to drag NMA and its allied associations to court for “embarking on strike without being a registered trade union.”
Non-medical health workers reject the position of DCMAC (deputy chairman of medical advisory committee), prompting the ministry to put it on hold for hospitals where the position had not been created, pending a court judgement, a stance health minister Onyebuchi Chukwu said was “misunderstood” by NMA.