The Federal Government says it will begin implementation of the Memorandum of Understanding with the Nigerian Medical Association on Monday (Aug. 23) to end the indefinite strike by Resident Doctors across the country.
The Minister of Labour and Employment, Dr Chris Ngige, said this while addressing newsmen before a closed-door meeting with NMA and other relevant stakeholders on Saturday in Abuja.
It would be recalled that the National Association of Resident Doctors (NARD) had embarked on an indefinite strike on Aug. 1 to press home its demands.
Ngigi said an agreement was reached on the Residency Training Fund outstanding for 2020 and 2021 after the Budget Office had explained that N617,429,121 was outstanding to be paid in 2020.
He said “Some people who are not supposed to benefit from the fund got money and because of that the number of genuine people that were not paid also came to that quantum of persons. So, reconciliation is being done and some monies are being returned. We have given a timeline for this reconciliation to be done and for 2021, the money approved by the government is N4.802 billion. This money, as I said earlier, was contained in the 2021 Supplementary Budget, which the President signed on the eve of his departure to the UK for the meeting and medical check-up. So, between that time and now, it became a money law. The funds have now been sourced and it has gotten from the CBN to the Budget Office where we expect it to be processed in one week as undertaken by the Government side. The meeting agreed that we need to let this matter. Therefore, the Budget Office of the Federation should start from the 2021 service vote to start paying. And if we have any leftovers, we roll it into 2022. Coming to hazard allowance, everybody agreed that the discussion is still ongoing and therefore government wants to finish it up. We agreed with the NMA position that they don’t want to discuss holistically anymore as an association and that they have their own peculiarities that are not the same as other health workers. We are going to do two meetings, one for NMA and affiliates and one for JOHESU. But we are taking the meetings concurrently so that we don’t run into troubled quarters. We are starting next week. We also agreed on the migration of doctors on GFMIS from some university teaching hospitals, like University College Hospital Ibadan, University of Calabar Teaching Hospital and University of Port Harcourt Teaching Hospital, which had recruited doctors on GFMIS and was unable to pay them when GFMIS was tampered with. We can resume when we verify those people. They can be there until the recruitment is perfected in order to migrate them to IPPIS. In this wise, the Head of Service has granted waiver and revalidation of old waivers for the University of Port Harcourt and waivers for University College Ibadan and Calabar. But this is not without reprimand for CMDs who have flouted government regulations by recruiting people into the service without fulfilling the requirements of circular on this. On the controversial issue of NSIWC circular, removing doctors in academia from CONMESS and also doctors who are doubling as honorary consultants/lecturers from CONMESS to CONUAS, we have even before their request treated one leg of it by obeying the court’s order already gotten by them. In the spirit of dialogue, we said further discussions should continue with NSIWC. NMA has undertaken that they should tell the two members and their association to do an out-of-court settlement by withdrawing the matter from the industrial court until we finish the negotiation. We gave a time for negotiation. We have empanelled a committee with NMA leading including NSIWC, Federal Ministry of Health, Federal Ministry of labour and others in the team. The first inaugural meeting is Tuesday (Aug. 31); we are hopeful that this meeting will give us suggestions on how to resolve the matter. We have before now made contact with the Governors’ Forum on these matters and the onus is now on us as the Ministry of Labour to talk to the Governors’ Forum and impress on them on the need for this to be done. The Medical Residency Training and accompanying Fund is already in the Act which the Federal Government has signed. We will impress it on them as part of strengthening the health system so that we are not starved of specialist doctors. There is an urgent need for them to adopt that. This will also help us to stem the issue of brain drain. The Federal Government cannot employ everybody. We want state governments to pay more attention to secondary and tertiary health”