STRIKING Nigerian doctors on Saturday said that they will begin a nationwide protest on Wednesday, accusing the country’s president, Bola Ahmed Tinubu, of ignoring their demands for improved pay and conditions as well as payment of owed earnings.

The protest became necessary “to press home our demands, which have been largely neglected by our parent ministry and the federal government,” Dr Innocent Orji, president of the Nigerian Association of Resident Doctors, wrote in an August 5 letter to the country’s Ministry of Health.

The resident doctors are graduate trainees providing critical care at public hospitals across Nigeria, which has one of the world’s lowest doctor-to-patient ratios, with two physicians per 10,000 residents, according to the Nigerian Medical Association.

The resident doctors have been on strike since July 26 to protest against unpaid salaries and demand improvements in pay and working conditions. 

But instead of meeting their demands, the nation’s Ministry of Health directed a “no work, no pay” policy against them along with other “punitive measures,” Dr Orji said.

In their letter to the Health Ministry, the doctors said that they would also picket government offices and other institutions until their demands are met.

The letter said: “We are pained that instead of making genuine and concerted efforts to resolve the challenges that led to the [strike] despite repeated ultimatums, our parent ministry and the federal government have chosen to demonise Nigerian resident doctors instead after all their sacrifices and patriotism.”

The planned protest follows a similar demonstration earlier this week by Nigerian trade unions protesting the soaring cost of living in Africa’s most populous country.

“This country is sitting on a keg of gunpowder, [and] focusing on local issues will be better for him,” Dr Erondu Nnamdi Christian, a resident doctor in south-eastern Abia state, said of President Tinubu’s efforts to resolve the coup in Niger.

 “Charity begins at home,” he said.