Speaker Abbas Meets President Tinubu Over Resident Doctors’ Strike

The Speaker of the House of Representatives, Rt. Hon. Abbas Tajudeen, on Tuesday night, met with President Bola Ahmed Tinubu on strike action embarked upon by the National Association of Resident Doctors of Nigeria (NARD).

Speaker Abbas had on Monday met with the national leadership of NARD and pleaded with them to shelve their planned strike.

During the meeting with the NARD leadership on Monday, Speaker Abbas appealed to the resident doctors to give the House leadership two weeks period to find solutions to the issues raised.

He equally promised to meet President Tinubu within 24 hours on the matter afterwhich he constituted an ad-hoc committee chaired by the Leader of the House, Prof. Julius Ihonvbere, to wade into the matter.

In keeping to his promise, Speaker Abbas met with President Tinubu on Tuesday night, where he briefed the President on the outcome of his meeting with the NARD leadership.

Speaker Abbas also pleaded with the President to wade into the matter with a view to addressing the issues raised by the resident doctors.

However, despite the Speaker’s intervention, NARD embarked on an indefinite strike on Tuesday evening.

Speaker Abbas had directed the ad-hoc committee to meet with all the stakeholders with a view to resolving the matter immediately.

The panel has the immediate-past chairman of the 9th House Committee on Healthcare Services, Hon. Tanko Sununu (APC, Kebbi) as the deputy chairman, while all medical practitioners in the House were co-opted into the ad-hoc committee.