Ngige charges NMA to tackle states over deteriorating health indices

Time has come for the Nigerian Medical Association (NMA), to take the battle for upliftment of the national healthcare system to the 36 states of the Federation, where governors have completely abdicated their responsibilities, the Minister of Labour and Employment, Dr Chris Ngige, has said.

The Minister, who stated this while receiving members of the NMA in Abuja, said states have totally abdicated their responsibilities to provide quality secondary healthcare to their citizens.His words: “Health is on the concurrent list and nothing stops the state governments from doing the primary, secondary and tertiary healthcare. In fact, when as a young doctor I did my housemanship, we had a hybrid of secondary and tertiary. That is why I left the teaching hospital and did mine at the Onitsha General Hospital, while some of my colleagues had theirs at the Enugu-Ukwu General Hospital, and Parklane Hospital in Enugu. But today, the state governments have run away from even primary healthcare. The secondary – most of their general hospitals are glorified residents for rodents and reptiles.”

Hence, the Minister called on the NMA to mobilise and sensitise its state chapters to take up the issue of the unfortunate abandonment of the responsibilities in healthcare delivery by the states.He added: “Your state branches should live up to expectation. Their job is not just to come to the general assembly to vote for strike and go back to their people and report. They should fight to protect the state health system. It is an incongruous situation that you go to a teaching hospital and see people on outpatient care for malaria, gastroenteritis etc. It mounts pressure on those teaching hospitals, making them unable to deliver on the major jobs they are supposed to do.”     

Ngige submitted that it is increasingly becoming impossible for the Federal Government to fund the health system in line with the Abuja declaration as a result of dwindling resources, saying the effective use of resources is now mandatory.He stated: “Let us use whatever we have effectively and efficiently. Let us plug leakages and wastes. There is a lot of waste in the system. Some doctors don’t take call duties but are paid call duty allowance. Why do you take call duty allowance when you are not on call? Some doctors also are not exposed to hazards, but take hazard allowances. Why?”

Providing insight into the just-concluded consequential adjustment of the National Minimum Wage, he regretted that a heavy chunk of the Federal Government budget is used to fund the recurrent expenditure, thus limiting dangerously, the capacity of government to deliver on physical infrastructure.
 
“How do we reconcile the fact that we are doing a budget of N10.3 trillion in 2020, and out of that, personnel cost alone is N3.88 trillion, amounting to one-third of the total? And when you add the running cost to it, it comes to N4 trillion. How do you explain that? It means we have no money left to even fund health, education, and other infrastructure. We are abandoning every other thing, and are only paying just salaries. It is frightening and worrisome. That’s why we have to put on our thinking caps,” he lamented.

He, however commended the NMA for being appreciative of government’s commitment to the welfare of workers, saying the Consolidated Medical Salary Scale is in the Category B of the Public Service remuneration grade already well-protected and remunerated before the consequential adjustment.
The Minister also explained that the NMA was not involved in the negotiation for the consequential adjustment of the minimum wage contrary to its request, because the Association was not a registered trade union to qualify for the membership of the Joint Public Service Negotiating Council. 
He therefore seized the opportunity to request the NMA and the National Association of Resident Doctors (NARD), to come together and register as a union since the Trade Union Act has made it difficult to register them as two separate unions, which they aspire to, knowing that they perform the same job.

Speaking earlier, the President of the NMA, Dr Francis Adedayo Faduyile, urged the Federal Government to declare emergency in the health sector, and set up national healthcare fund, the same manner government intervened in the entertainment industry. He also asked for the renegotiation of the Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA), entered into with the Federal Government in 2009, which ought to be renewed every three years, arguing that some of its terms such as the N5,000 hazard allowance were out of place in today’s realities.