• Orhue, NAMDA president, raises the alarm on members’ welfare
By Gabriel Dike
Dr. Nosa Orhue, is National President, Nigerian Association of Medical and Dental Academics (NAMDA). In this interview, he spoke on the union’s tortuous journey to recognition, progress recorded three years after, the future of NAMDA and other issues.
What is NAMDA all about?
NAMDA is the registered trade union for medical and dental teachers in the university system, teaching hospitals and research institutions. It is not an association of professionals. Her activities are governed by law. Her major objectives include but not limited to the defence of quality undergraduate and postgraduate medical education in Nigeria, protecting and advocating for the welfare of her members and advancing research. No one can do it better than ourselves especially in the university system where we have become endangered species.
What major roles do your members play in the university system?
Our members are medical and dental practitioners who teach and train persons wishing to become medical or dental practitioners in Nigeria. For clarity such practitioners must be a lecturer that teaches medical or dental students, or teaches medical doctors that are in training to become specialists in a discipline of medicine or dentistry.
There are insinuations that the FG recognised NAMDA to spite ASUU, what is your reaction?
The idea of a medical union was always there considering how some unions in the health sector used it to harass the Federal Ministry of Health (FMOH) that the Nigerian Medical Association (NMA), MDCAN and NARD are not registered trade unions.
The pursuit of a medical union actively started in 2018 as the Nigerian Medical Union (NMU) but it was not registered although the Federal Ministry of Labour and Employment (FMOLE) promised to do so. It was to be the trade union wing of the NMA just like what the British Medical Union (BMU) is to the British Medical Association (BMA) in the UK. It was to represent all medical doctors in the country but NMA eventually didn’t follow through even when NARD accepted to subsume her move to be registered as a trade union into that of the NMU.
In fact, NARD secured apparent approval but some of us and the NARD leadership at the time accepted that NMU will be more inclusive as suggested by the FMOLE unknown initially to us that the ministry had hidden reservations as exhibited during the meeting between NARD, FMOLE and the leadership of the Welfare and Remuneration committees of the NMA represented by the likes of Dr. Abdulrhaman Shehu, current NAMDA acting Secretary General, Dr. Mohammed Askira, the current National Liaison Officer of NAMDA, Dr. Jibril Abdullahi, the current National Publicity Secretary of NAMDA and myself, who sits as President of NAMDA.
The then Director, Trade Union Services remarked that they were actually worried about what the NMU would do when registered considering what NMA and NARD were already doing even when they are not yet registered as a trade union. According to her, what will happen when NMU is registered with legal teeth?
They eventually agreed to register NMU as a trade union but we never saw the letter of registration. The then NMA leadership was very interested but somehow the cycle was not completed.
When a sister union embarked on strike in 2022 and resorted to physical assaults on medical lecturers nationwide, we approached the FMOLE to register for us a union that will protect us against the unbearable violence against medical teachers. Luckily the ministry listened. The increasing destructive activities of the sister union against medical lecturers’ interest in the university system helped in the registration of NAMDA.
Two and a half years after NAMDA’s recognition, has anything changed?
Yes. Medical lecturers, no longer seek welfare offers through a third party that do not recognise our peculiarities. For example, a sister union requested that they wish to be removed from IPPIS. We reviewed it and found that it will be against our interest and rejected it publicly and in writing.
Recall that the court emphatically stated that the Federal Government cannot force the sister union members to accept IPPIS and that the FG should negotiate with them. The FG complied but failed to express the whole judgment by not inviting NAMDA and CONUA for their positions on the issue of IPPIS.
We notified the Minister of Education about this lapse but the then minister, Prof Tahir, pretended not to notice. After several reminders and our members were violently removed from IPPIS without our support, we approached National Industrial Court of Nigeria (NICN) for intervention. If there was no NAMDA, the ministry would have connived with the sister union and continued with the unrelenting destruction of the welfare interest of medical and dental lecturers in the universities inclusive of the state universities.
The current Minister of Education appears willing and tries to keep to the rules of the labour and trade union acts though the report submitted by the Alhaji Yayale Ahmed led 2009 renegotiation committee did not have our input or blessings as she did not interface with us even when the minister directed appropriately. So we take it as a report on the meetings between a sister union and the committee.
I am told he also did not meet with CONUA, another trade union for teachers in the university system. Yayale may have reasons for his actions for failing to comply with the ministerial directive. If there was no NAMDA we would be forced to swallow this agreement that did not take into consideration our peculiarities.
Is NAMDA part of the ongoing negotiations with the FG team?
No. However, as I said earlier, we have a letter from the ministry directing the chairman of the FG renegotiation committee to invite us for the negotiation. The FG committee did not. May be they will invite us for a fresh negotiation or to review the 2009 document to which we have a franchise.
What are your demands?
I can’t put everything out here but majorly to ensure that our basic salary should not be lower than what is paid to our colleagues in other parts of the civil service. So it is CONMESS or nothing. If it is bigger than CONMESS, it is even better. The implementation of CONMESS will solve the problem of underpayment and civil service status; a house officer has a level 10 statuses before NYSC.
Annoyingly, when that same officer completes service and joins the university system as a lecturer II, he is forced to that same level while those who pick an appointment with the teaching hospital enter as GL 13 officers due to skipping. We have this same problem at the consultant level. Specialists with fellowship or a PhD enter the university system as lecturer 1 with a GL 13 status whereas their colleague that picks a job with the hospital enters at GL 16 due to skipping.
Mind you, these same doctors are also practicing in the hospital along with the full time hospital employed doctors. This crisis has discouraged medical doctors, who are specialists and non-specialists from picking appointments with the university as lecturers.
Apart from the drop in take home and public service status, it affects our pension deeply! These disadvantages are not acceptable. All these were presented to the Ministry of Labour hence her directive in 2023 to the Federal Ministry of Finance to enroll our members into the IPPIS CONMESS platform, which solves all these problems with one stroke! The resistance from some quarters has led to our asking the court to intervene. While this is on, the cumulative effect has astronomically compounded the “Japa” syndrome.
Is there still discrimination against your members, who contest Vice Chancellor position?
Yes. There is still discrimination. Some of the VCs are clandestinely fraternising to keep paying our dues to a sister union even when members have signaled that their subscriptions should be paid to NAMDA. I suspect that many of them do not know that it is an offence according to the trade union act for an officer to fail to deduct dues on behalf of a trade union.
We are hoping we won’t get to the stage of dragging offending persons to the court for sanctions. Many institutions still have this urge to request for requirements not known to law for the position of VC. We have asked the court to interpret the acts setting up NAU, DELSU and the University Miscellaneous Act on the issue of VC appointments.
These cases are on point of law. However, we use this opportunity to commend Mr. President, Senator Bola Ahmed Tinubu for the prompt intervention in the case of NAU by enabling the Minister of Education, Dr. Olatunji Alausa to wisely intervene by calling NAU Governing Council to order including the dissolution of that governing council. Before the arrival of Alausa, Tahir, the immediate past minister behaved like an ostrich that buried his head in the sand while the universities burned!! He was a good example of Emperor Nero!!!
What is NAMDA’s position about the alleged move to abrogate TETFund?
We do not support it. TETFund has helped in providing some oxygen to the university system though it has been abused. Again we thank the current minister of education for redirecting TETFund to look into and extend her coverage to the teaching hospitals. This was a huge gap in the past, which is being plugged.
Medical or dental students, nurses, physiotherapists, medical laboratory scientists etc are trained in the hospitals. The universities provide the teachers, who need the hospitals to carry out appropriate training of the health professionals. So this directive by the FME should be supported.
More than 80 per cent of the training of medical and dental practitioners takes place in the teaching hospitals. The entire postgraduate medical education takes place in the teaching hospital with the university system having no legal role to play. Are we saying medical or nursing education is not education?
TETFUND should be protected to carry out her mandate as contained in the enabling act with proper interpretation and implementation. The minister has given a proper interpretation to the act, which was used to discriminate against education in the health sector in the past.
For NAMDA, is strike an option to get the government implement its demands?
This cannot be ruled out completely though low in our professed approach but certainly it will be a last resort. Part of the reasons for the formation of NAMDA was to protect medical education against bastardisation and violence on the treasured culture of the professions of medicine and dentistry.
It degenerated to the situation where medical lecturers were even attacked in the teaching hospitals in the glare of patients under the guise of “picketing” when lecturers were actively teaching medical students. Some were so bad that they disrupted an entire examination session taking place inside the teaching hospital setting.
The professions of medicine and dentistry do not have violent culture. We had to act in order to protect the culture we are known for… nobility and empathy. All these challenges coupled with the oppression being perpetuated by a union that ought to defend our peculiarities led to the existence of NAMDA today.
Who is Dr. Nosa Lancy Orhue?
I am a consultant physician that examines and preaches public health medicine to students at the undergraduate and postgraduate levels including residency training of medical doctors wishing to become specialists. I am married and I have five children.
I love studying politics, reading or viewing espionage novels and movies respectively I also love sports particularly football. Currently, I am the National Chairman of the Remuneration Committee of the Nigerian Medical Association. A good welfare for medical and dental practitioners brings me glowing smiles.