Olayemi Esan
The federal government has appealed to members of National Association of Resident Doctors (NARD) to shelve their planned strike action, urging them to consider the plight of the 80 percent of the citizenry in need of healthcare services, should they withdraw their services.
The resident doctors had threatened to shut down public health care facilities beginning from today, over unpaid salaries and other welfare packages.
Speaking at a conciliatory meeting with NARD yesterday in Abuja, minister of labour and employment, Sen. Chris Ngige, noted that the federal government had resolved majority of the welfare issues under contention even before the letter of complaint and notification of a planned strike action was delivered at the ministry.
He noted that as a conciliator, the complaint had been adequately communicated with the relevant ministries, adding that several meetings have been ongoing and proposals drawn to address the situation.
He said: “We are here because we have started solving your issues. We put up proposals with given timelines on how to deal with them.
We will look at those proposals with you, fix adequate timelines so that the people on the government side will be implementing and marking them as they execute them.
“I have held informal meetings with the finance ministry and they told me they have started solving some of the problems, the two committees in the National Assembly have also tried to get you and your employers on the same page. We have to intervene to ensure industrial peace in the health industry.
“We are in a very bad period health wise the world over and Nigeria is not an exception. So, we have to think about the generality of Nigerians because right now, 80 percent of Nigerians are our patients because of the COVID-19 pandemic so we have to look at the issues that way and see how we can get the best out of this situation.
