Daily Trust (Abuja)
.
5 November 2009
interview
Abuja — In this interview, the Federal Capital Territory (FCT) Chairman of the National Association of Nigerian Nurses and Midwives (NANNM) Comrade Abdullahi Yayaha speaks on potential threats to NANNM current negotiations with the Federal Government on the "discriminatory Call Duty Allowance" and the recent recall of health workers sacked by former FCT Minister Malam Nasir El-Rufa'i in 2006, amongst other issues.
The FCT Administration recently recalled some of your members who were sacked in 2006. What is your take on that?
We thank God and we thank the government of the FCT under Senator Mohammed Adamu Aliero for that magnanimity. Like we said before, people just asked for improvement in salaries and the government of El-Rufa'i under the Obasanjo administration laid them off and since then the health sector of the FCT has not been the same. We are happy that last month the minister approved the recall of about 50 health workers; most especially those of them with specialist certificates and who still have some years to go in service. We want to thank the minister for that magnanimity.
But there are some clauses or areas we are not satisfied with; for instance, these people were laid off not out of their own making but from government's perceived lapses. So, if government is saying they should come and pay back some money which they had been paid knowing full well that that would be impossible or that they would not give them promotion for these three years that they have been away, then, those areas we believe need to be looked into.
We expect that government would say, well, we are sorry for removing you from your job for no fault of yours, let us sit down and see how much we are owing you and how much have been paid to you and at the end of the day, we look at who is having an edge; if what we have paid you is more than your entitlement, we receive from you and if what we have paid you is not up to, we pay you back. But coming to say that they would be deducting from what the workers are supposed to get, that is the area that we are still finding difficult. But we want to thank government all the same for that effort.
What reason was given by the El-Rufa'i administration for the sack?
There was no reason, if you go to the master list of the retrenchment, they just put redundancy, redundancy and redundancy; no any other reason and we are saying that how can a health worker be redundant? The same people that are now being recruited in Britain, Europe and other countries, you say they are redundant. Just because they asked for improvement in salary and because there was no communication from the government, the workers decided to go on strike; the authorities just decided to retrench them in their numbers.
You said about 50 were recalled, how many were actually retrenched?
They were over 100 but you know from 2006 and now, some of them whether by age or by status would have retired normally. Some of them were at their bar, they don't have any specialist certificate to improve on their knowledge, so some of them were allowed to go. In the health sector the moment you refuse to go for further studies, you become obsolete and in fact a danger to the patient. Some of them who refused to improve on their studies and for instance have just one certificate for over 20 years were allowed to go.
Are you saying that the El-Rufa'i administration used that exercise as an excuse to punish some of your colleagues?
Yes, most definitely because most of the people that have been recalled now were in the leadership of the health workers union then.
Recently the Federal Government released a Medical Salary Structure (MSS) for medical doctors which your union protested against, leading to the setting up of a negotiating committee comprising your members and the Federal Government. What is the position now?
I am the State Chairman of the union in Abuja here, I am not a member of the negotiating team but on daily basis I call my national secretariat to enquire about what is happening and I am reliably informed that right now the three areas that were initially very controversial; Call Duty Allowance, Administrative Allowance and the Specialist Allowance for health workers have been narrowed down to only the Call Duty Allowance where the minister of health is still not ready to harmonise with the union.
What we are saying in Call Duty especially is that a doctor who is on level 12 receives the same amount of money with a physiotherapist, nurses, pharmacist, the laboratory scientist and everybody who is on that same grade level. They must be paid the same amount of money and that is just what will bring equity. That is the area right now where the ministry of health is still having difficulty affecting and if that is not done, no matter the other things that might have been done, that will not create the harmony that we are looking for.
In specific terms, where is the problem with the call duty?
The doctors always assume that they are the leaders of the hospital or the health team and they must earn higher than the others and we are saying no; if you are coming out fresh from school and you are on level 12 and these others will take 10 to 15 years to get to level 12, we have already closed the gap on length of service or length you spent in school. That is one; no doctor can perform alone in the hospital. Medical profession is not like the law or a surveyor or an engineer, the doctor, for him to diagnose you properly, will need the services of a radiographer, laboratory scientist, physiotherapist and others.
If a surgeon opens up a patient, immediately he opens you up and sews you back, you need continuous services of the nurse for the wound to heal and for you to go back home. That shows you the hospital work is a team work. if you pay doctors alone, the implication is that patients will suffer because when a patient comes, of course the doctor will not always be there and every other person will say well, since you are paying the doctors all the money, we will all wait and let the doctor do all the work and everybody knows that doctors cannot do all the work and that is the fear; that is why we are already shouting out and calling on the public to also join us to shout and say, please pay all the relevant health professionals the same quality of money for them to be able to give qualitative service. If there is disparity especially in Call Duty, or Shift Duty, then the crisis and the disharmony will continue.
Are you saying that only the doctors receive the Call Duty Allowance?
In the past, there was this glaring disparity where doctors were collecting four percent, the pharmacists were collecting two and a half percent of their basic salaries and the nurses were collecting one point seven percent; government did a job evaluation and discovered that other health workers have seriously closed that gap. But the ministry of health has abandoned that job evaluation to go for a straight forward table. The same table now is what the other health workers are saying well and fine, the table you have adopted for doctors; use it for other health workers. If a doctor on level 12 is for instance earning N1000 per unit call, let the pharmacist on level 12, a nurse on level 12 and a physiotherapist earn N1000.
We are not saying that a doctor that is on level 12 and a nurse that is on level 7 should be paid the same money. We are saying health workers on the same level should earn the same amount of Call Duty. Anything short of that will bring disharmony and even if government force people to accept it, the work in the hospitals will not move because all these people will leave the work and say if the doctor earn all the money, let him do all the job and it is obvious that the doctor cannot do all the job; why are we deceiving ourselves?
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