- For decades, the struggles of Nigerias healthcare system have been documented and have affected the quality and number of doctors available locally
- According to the World Health Organization (WHO), at least 2,000 Nigerian doctors emigrate annually to hotspots like the United Kingdom, the United States, and Canada.
- As they work to save lives, doctors who spoke to TheTalk.NG bemoaned bad working conditions in the FCT
Health workers recruited by FCT authorities when President Tinubu was preparing to assume office lamented that they had not been adequately remunerated.
Photo credits: Dragana991, Nyesom WikeSource: UGCWe were employed by the FCTA around May 2023. Although we all have different dates of resumption, we were told in FCTA that it takes three months to process our details and start getting paid. But that wasnt so in our case. Majority of us worked for six months straight without getting paid, not even the first 28-day working allowance.”We managed and pulled it through and kept coming to work unpaid. Most of us are running from one financial loan to another just to keep up.Through our association, we have written letters to the FCT minister and the minister of state for the FCT (Mariya Mahmud), but it is unclear if it has reached the two cabinet members of President Bola Tinubu. Nothing fruitful came out of it.We kept going to different offices in Abuja, including approaching the office of the head of the Integrated Personnel and Payroll Information System (IPPIS), but no result.The perm sec came out and addressed us. He initially said it is against the civil service rule to protest, that we are privileged to be employed. He concluded by saying they would look into the matter and we would be paid by 29th June (2024). Unfortunately, no payment until now.It was the seventh month that they eventually paid. It was a shock, in the sense that the arrears were not paid. They just paid one month, and that is how theyve been doing to date.That is to say, the majority of us are being owed six months, from May to October 2023.Alleged unfairness in civil serviceBy the time they now paid the nursing cadre, those that were employed with us were all paid. The same thing to pharmacists. So, we were so shocked.As I speak, it is not only the six months arrears that they are owing us, the 25 percent salary increment which took effect from June 2023 down to November of that year, we saw nothing too.Poor working conditions have pushed doctors overseasFG approves N25k allowance for doctors
