Minister of Labour and Employment, Senator Chris Ngige, has criticised the bill seeking to control the migration of Nigerian doctors abroad for medical practice.
The bill, which is still before the National Assembly, has been met with resistance from the Nigerian Association of Resident Doctors (NARD), which threatened to embark on a five-day warning strike if the bill is passed.
The bill seeks to mandate Nigerian-trained medical or dental practitioners to practice in Nigeria for a minimum of five years before being granted a full license by the council.
Ngige has said that the bill runs contrary to extant labor laws. He further emphasised that nobody can say they will not get a practicing license until after five years.
“Nobody can say they (doctors) will not get a practising licence till after five years. It will run counter to the laws of the land that have established the progression in the practice of medicine.
“I am a medical doctor. When you graduate from medical school, you go on a one year apprenticeship called 'housemanship' or internship as the case maybe. After your internship, you are now given a full licence because prior to that, what you have is a provisional licence of registration with the Nigerian Medical and Dental Council of Nigeria (MDCN).
“So, after that intensive training, you were signed off by consultants and you became a fully qualified medical doctor to attend to human beings and to work without any supervision again. Supervision then is voluntary.
“Resident Doctors are those who have that full licence and they want to acquire post-graduate speciality and speciality is known like surgeons, gynecologists, obstetricians, pediatricians, internal medicine of family medicine. So, they are doctors in training.
“The bill in National Assembly cannot stop anybody from getting a full licence. That bill is a private member’s bill.
“That bill was moved by a lawmaker from Lagos. So, members of his constituency can tell him this is worrying us. Can’t we check these doctors this way by you going to speak rather than put up a document?
“That document, as far as I am concerned, is not workable. I don’t support it and I will never support it. Like I said before, it is like killing a fly with a sledge hammer."
"They should think of other ways if they are trying to check brain drain, there should be other ways.
“If a doctor has read on scholarship, you bond him, if a doctor has read on bursary, you can bond him. If a doctor is trained like we are doing now on little or nothing which is like a scholarship again because ₦50,000 a session per medical student is nothing when their counterparts overseas pay seventy thousand pounds for a session.
“So, I don’t support that bill but can bond them if you want.”
On the issue of the planned warning strike by NARD, Ngige said it is not necessary since the government is already engaged with the Nigerian Medical Association (NMA), their umbrella body.