Nigerian public physicians go on strike over issues of welfare and compensation

Frontline doctors in Nigeria’s state hospitals went on strike for five days starting on Friday because they were not paid their allowances and their union said there were unresolved welfare issues.

The head of the Nigerian Association of Resident Doctors (NARD), Kazeem Odumbaku, told Reuters that the government had not met their demands, which included paying back salaries and giving them the 2025 medical residency training fund.

The group said that talks with government leaders had failed several times.

As a training for becoming specialists, resident doctors are medical school grads. In Nigeria, they are very important to primary healthcare because they run most of the emergency rooms in hospitals.

There are more than 40,000 doctors in the west African country, and the group speaks for about 15,000 of them.

Nigerian nurses went on strike in July over problems with pay and hiring.

A lot of the time, Nigerian doctors go on strike because they say they are working in bad conditions because they are chronically underfunded and mismanaged.

In 2020, when the COVID-19 outbreak was at its worst, they quit their jobs three times.