Osun State medical doctors on Tuesday staged a public protest against the non-payment of their salaries by the state government. Dressed in lab coats, they all marched from OSAMDO House to the House of Assembly where they submitted their protest letter to the Deputy Speaker, Mr. Akintunde Adegboye, who received them. They expressed their discomfort stating that they had not been paid since October 2015, adding that the state government was only paying them stipends before it stopped paying them in September.
Ogunyemi said the sympathy strike planned by the Obafemi Awolowo University Teaching Hospital, Ile-Ife, doctors would commence on Wednesday if nothing was done to avert this.
The spokesman for the governor, Mr. Semiu Okanlawon, said “In the face of the current economic realities, it remains unbelievable that doctors would insist that they would not be bound by the payment regime agreed to by over 39,000 other workers in the state, which was arrived at after a rigorous deliberation on the finances of the state within the context of the national economic realities.”
“By December, we told them they should resume work and they have remained adamant that they want to earn what we cannot afford. In the first instance, except in communist country, you cannot force anybody to work, you can’t drag workers to work under democracy.
“It is either you want to work or you don’t want to work. But if you cannot take what we are offering and what other workers including doctors in local government areas, including consultants at the state level are taking, we cannot afford it.”
