Nigeria's threatened nationwide strike by resident doctors is moving towards suspension after the Chief of Staff to the President, Femi Gbajabiamila, brokered an agreement between the Federal Government and the National Association of Resident Doctors. Speaking on Channels Television, a leader of the association said that the intervention had, in his words, effectively solved the doctors' outstanding matters, opening the way for the planned industrial action to be shelved.
The NARD official stressed that this was not the first time Gbajabiamila had stepped into disputes involving resident doctors. He recalled that the very first opportunity the Chief of Staff had to intervene came around six or seven years ago, when he was Speaker, and said that whenever he had entered into the association's issues, their matters had been resolved. That track record, he added, was the basis for the confidence the doctors now placed in the latest understanding.
According to the association, the breakthrough centred on firm timelines rather than vague promises. Various agencies of government agreed on specific timeframes for dealing with the doctors' concerns over salary and promotion, with the two sides settling on figures and numbers during the talks. The NARD leader said that on the long-running call issue at the Lagos University Teaching Hospital, a timeline of about a week had been agreed for implementation.
A significant part of the agreement dealt with house officers, the newest doctors in the system, who had been forced to wait long periods to receive their pay. The talks produced a commitment that they would no longer have to wait almost a whole month before being paid the previous month's salary. Gbajabiamila issued a standing order that, from now on, the salaries of house officers must be paid before the tenth of every month.
Despite the progress, the NARD representative was careful not to declare the dispute over. He said plainly that he could not stand and announce that the strike had been called off, insisting instead that he had the utmost confidence that the Chief of Staff's intervention had moved the needle to a very large extent towards resolving the association's grievances. The formal decision, he made clear, was not his to take alone.
Instead, the association said it would wait until Monday to finalise its position. The NARD leader explained that he would have to report everything agreed back to the members of the national executive council, after which the leadership would sit down together and take a collective decision on whether to suspend the planned action. Only that internal process, he indicated, would determine the final outcome.
The developments were reported as the Federal Government continued to defend its wider economic reforms, with the resident doctors' welfare emerging as one of the most closely watched flashpoints. For patients across the country, the prospect of the strike being suspended offered relief, even as the doctors made clear that the pledges agreed with the government would need to be implemented on the timelines set out during the meeting.