..insists on invoking no-work-no-pay rule
Minister of Labour and Employment, Sen. Chris Ngige, has told the striking medical doctors that the disputed Residency Training Fund would soon be disbursed to them.
Ngige gave this assurance to the members of the National Association of Resident Doctors (NARD) in a chat with the State House Correspondents after a meeting with President Muhammadu Buhari at the Presidential Villa at the weekend.
The minister, who insisted that the government would invoke the no-work-no-pay rule, said the doctors should resume work first while they continue to negotiate further on their requests.
Ngige said the Ministry of Health had already got the list of doctors who were supposed to benefit from the fund and was in the process of scrutinizing them.
He said: “Total submission of about 8,000 names was obtained and the Ministry of Health is scrutinizing them. We have done the first round of scrutinization and they will now compare what they have with the Post-Graduate Medical College and the Chief Medical Directors who submitted the names.
“The Association of Resident Doctors, in each of the tertiary centres, worked with the CMDs to produce those names, but now that the names are being verified, we discovered that about 2000 names shouldn’t be there because they don’t have what is called Postgraduate Reference Numbers of National Postgraduate Medical College and (or) that of the West African Postgraduate Medical College.
“So, this is it and that is the only thing holding back the Residency Fund payment because it is there already; incurred expenditure has been done by the Finance Minister and it’s in the Accountant-General’s office. So, once they verify the authenticity of those they are submitting, the Accountant-General will pay.”