Ahmed begs FG, doctors to resolve strike

The Kwara State Governor, Alhaji Abdulfatah Ahmed, has pleaded with the Federal Government and the striking members of the Nigerian Medical Association to urgently resolve their differences so that the strike could be called off.

He spoke during the Annual General Meeting and Scientific Conference of the NMA, Kwara State branch in Ilorin on Wednesday.

The AGM was entitled, ‘Medical practice and social security: Looking inwards.’

The governor urged the parties to negotiate a mutually acceptable solution to the ongoing strike.

“We urgently need to end the avoidable pains and grief visited on families by the strike,” Ahmed said.

But the outgoing Chairman of NMA, Kwara State chapter, Prof. Olayinka Buhari, said the doctors were not unaware of the hardship the strike was inflicting on the patients.

He added that the NMA had thought that the issues would be quickly resolved but added that the Federal Government should be held responsible for the delay.

He said, “A government that had broken countless promises in the past cannot be trusted to keep new ones. Issues that led to a warning strike late last year are yet unresolved, even when establishment circulars have been issued. Clear pronouncements by those competent to make them are now being disputed by the same people.

“The association has not introduced any new condition for calling off the strike. What we have done is to insist on a basic minimum demonstration of good faith on the part of the government, while we give time for the other issues to be resolved. Public grandstanding notwithstanding, the Minister of Health, Prof. Onyebuchi Chukwu, knows what it will take to bring this matter to an end,” Buhari said.

He stated that the doctors had resolved to see the impasse to a logical conclusion. He hoped that this would mark the end of industrial action by the medical and dental practitioners in the country if government acceded to their demand.

Buhari appealed to Nigerians to bear with the medical doctors over the strike and to pressurise the government to expeditiously look into the issues and fully resolve the conflict.

He said that in a sector where the medical and dental practitioners were accorded leadership status in other countries by virtue of training, skills, knowledge and responsibility, doctors in Nigeria faced increasing hostility from the support staff in the hospitals.