Strike: Why Atiku Backed Resident Doctors

Former Vice President Atiku Abubakar has backed the ongoing nationwide strike by the Nigerian Association of Resident Doctors, NARD. The resident doctors have declared strike over the federal government’s plan to stop the implementation of the revised professional allowance table, PAT.
Shuaibu Ibrahim, NARD’s secretary-general, gave the order on the members to go on strike, after the association’s virtual extraordinary national executive council, NEC. The strike, he said, will commence on Tuesday.
In his reaction, Abubakar said it was wrong for the government to enter an agreement with the doctors, and not renege. He said the doctors are very important to the country because they are the ‘first line’ of defence in Nigeria’s health sector which is almost collapsing.
Abubakar: “The Federal Government signed a deal on the Professional Allowance Table, and now it wants to abandon it. This is not governance; it is betrayal.
“Our resident doctors are the last line of defence in hospitals that are already collapsing. They work gruelling hours, in impossible conditions, for pay that insults their sacrifice. And now, the government seeks to take away the little that was promised? The Tinubu administration must demonstrate commitment to the issues: 19 months of unpaid Professional Allowance arrears; promotion arrears gathering dust; a Medical Residency Training Fund stuck in bureaucratic limbo; and a government that treats its doctors as an afterthought and remains unconcerned as they flee the country in droves.
“Every doctor Nigeria loses to the UK, Canada, or Saudi Arabia is a failure of leadership, not a failure of patriotism. You cannot ask people to serve a nation that refuses to honour its own word.
“I stand with NARD. Pay what you owe. Honour what you signed. Or explain to 200 million Nigerians why their hospitals will go dark on Tuesday.”