Health workers across the country under the aegis of the Nigerian Union of Allied Health Professionals (NUAHP) on Monday declared a nationwide indefinite strike following alleged government’s insensitivity to their plights.
Already, with the declaration of the strike, patients at the University College Hospital (UCH) have started groaning on the pains and hardship the strike would bring to the sick ones who were admitted in the hospital.
The aggrieved health workers said since the 2009 pact reached with the government, nothing has been done by the government to implement the agreement.
NUAHP is made up of physiotherapists, dietitians, medical laboratory scientists, radiographers, optometrists, pharmacists, dental therapists, dental technologists, medical physicists, health information officers, clinical psychologists, occupational therapists and medical social workers and others.
Addressing journalists at a press conference held at UCH on Monday, the National President of NUAHP, Dr. Ogbonna Obinna Chimeola, maintained that “the indefinite strike action which kicked off at 12:00 a.m. on Monday had become inevitable as the Federal Government had neither seen any reason to address the issues in contention positively nor communicate to the union the resolutions of the high-powered meeting held last month at the instance of the Secretary to the Government of the Federation (SGF).”
“The union had waited patiently and had shown enough restraints and had exhausted all other industrial means because of the poor Nigerian masses who will suffer when we withdraw our services from the health facilities nationwide.
We have been pushed to the wall and this strike is inevitable,” the NUAHP president said.
THE NATION
