The federal government has said it is ready to withdraw the case it instituted against striking resident doctors if they return to their duty posts.
Minister of labour and employment, Dr Chris Ngige, disclosed this to State House correspondents after meeting with President Muhammadu Buhari at the Presidential Villa, Abuja, yesteday.
He insisted that the ‘no work, no pay’ policy would be observed because it is a global best practice which is also captured in Section 43 of the Trade Dispute Act under the International Labour Organisation (ILO).
He said: “In the main, I discussed the state of the healthcare system and industrial disputes with Mr. President. As you well know, the resident doctors are still on strike. Their strike has now entered the 33rd day today. Meanwhile, the government is doing everything possible to make sure they get back to work.
“Out of their 12-point issues raised in their demands, we have done all. We have come to agreement on all, including those that even affect the Medical and Dental Consultants Association of Nigeria and medical doctors who are in academics and teaching hospitals, so, we have handled it all.
“The only point of disagreement now is that they said that the agreements and the memorandum of action government should insert include that Section 43 of the Trade Dispute Act will not apply to them.
“That section says that when a worker withdraws his services from his employer, the employer is at liberty to withhold payment of emoluments to him and the ILO principles at work and strike said you can use that money to pay other people you have engaged in that particular period of strike.
“So, you have a right to strike, but your employer has also the right to withhold your emolument. More importantly, in other climes, before unions go on strike, by that principle, they discuss with their workers and bring out what they call strike funds and it’s from the strike funds that the union will use to pay the workers who have gone on strike. They will also agree on the number of days the strike will last.
“That’s why overseas and in other climes, you don’t see strikes getting more than three days or four days or five days highest. And more importantly again, people on essential services, medical services, in particular, where you can lose life, they don’t go on strike any anyhow. They only do picketing and things like that, because people’s lives are involved.”
Ngige said the government had before now applied the ‘no work, no pay’ rule on some unions that embarked on strike.
“So, this is where we are with them and we are saying that even if anybody cares to put it in any agreement, that clause will be void ab initio because it’s against the law of the land and we will not, as a government, succumb to undue arm twisting and then go and sign that. Other workers have lost their pay during strikes; the Joint Health Systems Union (JOHESU), they lost their pay in 2018 when they went on four months strike.They lost about two or three months’ pay when the no-work, no-pay law was invoked.
“The Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU), no-work, no-pay applied to them. Nobody paid them anything for six months and it was during COVID-19. So, we can handle things administratively, but nobody should arm-twist us.”
Speaking of the court case the federal government instituted against the striking resident doctors, the Labour minister said he told the president that “we’ve agreed that they should come back to work, and if they come back to work, we can take other things from there; we’ll drop the case in court and then they will come back and get things done.”
Ngige said further that “the Salaries, Incomes and Wages Commission, in conjunction with the Office of the Head of Service, had a meeting and they are jointly going to do a circular that will be issued for Salaries, Incomes and Wages to reiterate that the House Officers and Youth Corps doctors are still on CONMES scale one and two respectively. So, I think we are doing the implementation.
“Also, from the monitoring meeting we did this morning, the Ministry of Health has gotten the list of doctors who supposedly are to benefit from the Medica Residency Training Fund. Total submission of about 8,000 names were obtained and the Ministry of Health is scrutinising them. We have done the first round of scrutiny and they will now compare what they have with the Post-Graduate Medical College and the chief medical directors who submitted the names.”
He noted that “the Association of Resident Doctors in each of the tertiary centres worked with the CMDs to produce those names, but now that the names are being verified, we discovered that about 2000 names shouldn’t be there because they don’t have what is called Postgraduate Reference Numbers of National Postgraduate Medical College and (or) that of the West African Postgraduate Medical College.
“So, this is it and that is the only thing holding back the Residency Fund payment.”
Ngige added that the verification was being carried to avoid an ugly past experience.
“In 2020, the submitted names didn’t come through the appropriate source, which is the Postgraduate Medical College, and payment was affected and it was discovered that about 588 persons who were not resident doctors benefited from such money and they are now finding it difficult to make the full refund, but they have to refund that money. Some are refunding, but there is no full consideration of the account. That account has to be reconciled to enable the accountants to pay the next round of funding for 2021.
“That’s what I briefed Mr. President on and we also discussed some policies, which is not for public consumption now. We take it in its stride as the days come by, but we did discuss politics, the state of our party nationally,” he added.
Culled from the Leadership News Nigeria
