The National Association of Resident Doctors (NARD) has agreed to suspend their nationwide strike, after the federal government team led by the Minister for Labour and Employment, Chris Ngige, agreed to pay the N13.4 billion salaries shortfall accrued to them.
Resident doctors in the country commenced a nationwide strike on Monday, September 4, 2017, after the leadership of NARD rejected the promissory offer from the Government. They insisted that all the items in their demand list be met before the strike would be called off.
After a 14-hour meeting which ended around 3am this morning, both the federal government representatives and NARD excos, issued a communique to bring the strike to an end as soon as the payment alert is received from the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN). Both parties at the meeting agreed that:
NARD national officers should present the outcome of the renegotiated memorandum of terms of settlement to an emergency meeting of its members by Friday, September 8, 2017 with a view to suspending the strike once there is an evidence of payment of the mandate presented to the meeting to the affected institutions.- NARD members are on pensionable appointment and as such the Federal Ministry of Health in conjunction with the Office of Accountant General of the Federation and Budget Office of the Federation should take necessary steps to ensure that adequate budgetary allocations are made to cover the pension requirements of NARD members.
NARD members should be on the IPPIS platform and that the CMDs as well as the MDs should be requested by the Federal Ministry of Health to submit their nominal roll to the Office of the Accountant General of the Federation and copy the Federal Ministry of Health and Federal Ministry of Labour and Employment on or before September 15, 2017.- All resident doctors should be captured on IPPIS platform by the end of October 2017.
- Payment is to individual health institutions after the verification of affected doctors and that all the federal health institutions already verified should be paid on or before 8th September, 2017 and subsequently pay others after following due process. According to media reports, one of the resident doctors stated that strike action would be recommenced if the payment is not made.“Definitely if there’s no alert there’s no need to call people, because we will automatically resume (strike)” He said.
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