Doctors,
pharmacists and other health professionals on internship at the Lagos
University Teaching Hospital, Idi-Araba, on Monday protested the
non-payment of their salary for seven months.
The junior medical professionals, in
their white overalls, were seen carrying placards with inscriptions such
as, “5,040 hours without PAY” 3-7 months without Pay and Food” during a
protest within the LUTH premises.
They said they had commenced an indefinite strike until the Federal Government decided to pay all their arrears and salaries.
According to some of the doctors, who
spoke with our correspondent on condition of anonymity for fear of
victimisation by the hospital management, most of them have not being
paid since they began their internship in January.
They said that though they had
complained several times through their association, they were yet to get
any response from the hospital management and the government.
One of the interns said most of them had
not been captured by the International Personal Payroll Information
System which the Federal Government introduced for the payment of its
staff salaries last year and that there were various irregularities in
the payment structure for the few that had been captured by the
computation system.
Another house officer, who addressed the
interns, told our correspondent that non-payment of junior medical
workers’ salaries had been a problem even before the IPPIS was
introduced.
He said, “We will not go back to work
until everyone of us has been paid. We work day and night in these
hospitals without complaints but they won’t pay us. It seems the only
thing government knows is strike. We work like slaves, yet we are still
struggling to feed.
“We cannot pay our rent. For those
living outside the premises, we cannot afford to transport ourselves and
they expect us to keep quiet because we are interns.”
However, the Nigerian Medical
Association has given the Federal Government a 21-day ultimatum to
resolve the non-payment of salaries of house officers and locum doctors
omitted in the IPPIS.
The association, in a communiqué at the
end of its National Executive Council Meeting in Sokoto, Sokoto State,
said it would no longer tolerate the recurrent irregularities in the
implementation of IPPIS in payment of doctors.
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