The bill aiming to require medical and dental professionals to work for five years in Nigeria before being awarded a full license and transferring overseas has been rejected by Chris Ngige, Minister of Labour and Employment.
Recall that the All Progressives Congress (APC) representative from Lagos, Ganiyu Johnson, sponsored a measure that recently passed second reading in the House of Representatives.
According to the legislator, the bill aims to change the Medical and Dental Practitioners Act of 2004 in order to combat the brain drain in the medical industry.
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Due to the federal government’s refusal to comply with their requests, the Nigerian Association of Resident Doctors (NARD) stated on Monday that a five-day warning strike would start on Wednesday.
In a statement issued, the association listed the national assembly’s removal of the anti-brain drain measure as one of their main objectives.
After the Federal Executive Council (FEC) meeting on Monday, Ngige said he does not support the anti-brain drain bill because it is an impractical piece of legislation.
The minister said that after completing the required steps acknowledged by the Nigerian Medical and Dental Council of Nigeria (MDCN), no lawmaker or other person could prevent medical physicians and dentists from obtaining their practicing licenses.
Because the measure cannot prevent someone from obtaining a full license, Ngige recommended the legislature to search for “other ways” to combat the brain drain.
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He said: “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, gynaecologists, obstetrics, paediatrics and internal medicine or family medicine. So, they are doctors in training.
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“The bill in the National Assembly cannot stop anybody from getting a full licence. That bill is a private members’ bill.
“In the National Assembly, they attend to private members’ bills and executive bills. Executive bills emanate from the government into the National Assembly with the stamp of the executive.
“It is either sent by the attorney general of the federation or by the president but usually from the attorney general of the federation. So, it’s not an executive bill, it’s a private members bill.
“That bill is moved by the man 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 than put up a document?
“That document is as far as I am concerned, not workable. Ab initio, I don’t support it and I will never support it. Like I said before, it is like killing a fly with a sledgehammer.
“They should think of other ways if they are trying to check brain drain, there should be other ways.
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“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 N50,000 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 you can bond them if you want.”
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