The Medical and Health Workers‘ Union of Nigeria (MHWUN) has called for improved welfare packages to address the ongoing brain drain in the healthcare sector, commonly referred to as “Japa Syndrome.”
During the 50th session of the National Executive Council (NEC) meeting held in Abuja yesterday, MHWUN president Comrade Kabiru Sani Minjibir lamented critical challenges facing the health sector.
He noted that the migration of healthcare workers was largely due to poor welfare conditions, including unpaid salary arrears and the lack of necessary adjustments to salary structures.
Minjibir urged the federal government to promptly release outstanding eight-month salary arrears for regulatory agency members and address the decaying infrastructure in health facilities across the country.
He further stressed the importance of government collaboration with organised labour to find lasting solutions to the economic hardships facing Nigerians.
The MHWUN leadership also called on the minister of Health and Social Welfare to eliminate obstacles hindering the realisation of workers‘ demands to ensure a more stable and effective healthcare system.
He said, „We have a lot of issues which are going to be deliberated during the business sessions of the next meeting. Part of it is migration of workers outside the country, which we refer to as Japa Syndrome and this is as a result of lack of welfare of the members and secondly, we have issues of non-payment of outstanding seven-month one-year‘s arrears.
“Let me use this occasion to once again call on the Honourable Minister of Health and Social Welfare, as a father figure to all Health Workers, to remove every encumbrance and facilitate the actualisation of our demands for the overall good of the health sector.
“It is also pertinent to use this platform to draw the attention of the Honourable Minister of Health to the issue of decaying infrastructure in our health facilities and urge him to pursue policies that would reverse the situation and curb the pull and push factors responsible for the alarming incidences of brain drain and migration of health workers.”