Resident doctors in Nigeria’s public hospitals began a five-day strike on Friday over unpaid allowances and unresolved welfare issues, their union said.
Kazeem Odumbaku, secretary-general of the Nigerian Association of Resident Doctors (NARD), told Reuters the government had failed to meet demands including disbursement of the 2025 medical residency training fund and payment of salary arrears. He said repeated negotiations with officials had not yielded results.
Resident doctors — medical graduates training as specialists — staff many emergency wards and are critical to frontline care in Africa’s most populous nation. NARD represents about 15,000 resident doctors out of more than 40,000 physicians nationwide.
Healthcare walkouts are frequent in Nigeria, where unions cite poor working conditions and chronic underfunding. Nurses staged a strike in July, and NARD members walked out three times in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic.