President Muhammadu Buhari’s administration has been criticized by the Joint Health Sector Union (JOHESU) for failing to fulfill the African Union’s 15% benchmark budget for the medical sector.

According to the Health Union, the administration lacks the willpower to initiate and execute various agreements struck to improve the country’s health sector.

Dr. Ogbona Obinna, the Union’s National Vice Chairman, said in a monitored program on Channels Television yesterday: “The essence of the strike is to call the attention of the government to a prevailing situation. Before now, we had certain ultimatums, served the government, and at the real hours of the ultimatum, you now see the government inviting us.

“The problem of these unending dialogue is that after you have reached a compromise, that you have distilled the discussion into Memorandum of Action or Agreement, MOA, you still find out that the willpower to reach those agreements is not there! For instance, on the 30th of September 2017, we had a 16 points demand that agreement was reached.

“And some of the agreements had timelines, some of them ought to have been activated and executed within five weeks, some two weeks but to our surprise, after those timelines, the government did not do anything about it. We waited for about one year, nothing was done.

“In 2018, we had to begin another strike in April to May, nothing tangible was done, instead we were visited by the no work no pay rule, we were taken to court. The judge at the national industrial court of Nigeria sent a consent judgment. From then till now, none of the consent judgments had been implemented. In 2020, the Covid-19 issue came up and everybody remained calm, around September 2020, we also served the government another ultimatum, which also expired and we had to go for a seven-day warning strike,” he said.

“The government did not even bother to invite us for any dialogue to address the situation. It was on the 21st of July 2021 that the Federal Ministry of Health invited us to a meeting with the same old story that they are working on, but we cannot see any visible action. The rate of entropy (i.e. disorderliness) is high and the enthalpy (i.e. change in heat) and the government should be held responsible because they did not enter into the agreement in duress.

“We are not strike mongers, one of the problems we have in the health sector is under funding. Just imagine the highest budget in the health sector is about 6.2 percent in 2012. in 2019, it was about 4.4 percent. Even with the advent of Covid – 19, it was about 4.45 percent as against the AU benchmark of 15 percent. Go to South Africa, their budgetary allocation is 12 percent. This 4.4 percent that is rolled out from the budgetary of 30 trillion, is a reflection of 547billion and when you divide it by 200 million, it translates to about N247 per month for an average Nigerian to seek health.”