Our doctors are back... any lessons?

We just came out of a three-week stand-off between medical doctors and the government over a row on conditions of service (COS). The striking doctors initially threatened mass resignation and later commuted that to extended strike until they see their COS. The government insisted on no negotiations till the doctors called off their ‘illegal’ strike.

A little background is needed. For the past 10 years, doctors have been agitating for COS, especially when health service was proclaimed an essential service. While government and the public have always been quick to remind doctors that they are an essential service and, therefore, cannot go on strike, they are slow to remember that essential service providers take COS, including retirement on salary for some officer classes, which are denied doctors and which doctors are legitimately calling for. Doctors only get two weeks of free mortuary services after their death. To whom much is given, much is expected and from whom much is expected, much must be given.

If one is an essential service provider, he should be treated as such with the equity of other essential services. Why should the doctor, an essential service provider, pay for his hospital bills from the same service he works for, receive inadequate salary, retire as a pauper with peanuts for his SSNIT benefit? No doctor in the public sector can retire to his own home if he depended on his legitimate proceeds from his employment alone in spite of his self-denial in his working life.

Background
Last year, doctors embarked on strike for a correction in their salaries and other allowances. There was some unrest and the general public prevailed on them to resume work. Then they decided to look at the issue in a broader perspective, to revisit the COS.

They called for negotiations on COS as far back as November 2014 and gave the government eight months to complete discussions on it. They sent letters to all stakeholders, including the Labour Commission, who might plead should there be any strike action. Nobody responded. The doctors sent reminders as the deadline drew close. These fell on deaf ears until a week to the deadline when the government rushed to meet them. Even at the meeting, it was clear that there was no commitment on the part of the government. So the doctors activated their road map of progressive withdrawal of services to lead to mass resignation.

Government communicators and propagandists called the doctors names, including murderers and unpatriotic. The government decided to bring Cuban doctors to the rescue. The Labour Commission and gurus pronounced the strike action illegal and encouraged the government to stay away from negotiations till the doctors returned.

I want to emphatically say that the government, its’ advisors, communicators and all who thought like them got it wrong and handled the issue very poorly.

There are 2,800 doctors but let us assume it is only 2000 involved (the others are in private and other services where they have COS. Are you going to bring 2,000 Cuban doctors? Next time, it will be the turn of the nurses and other health workers with much bigger workforce. Are you going to bring 20,000 Cuban nurses? Akosua’s cartoon of the Daily Guide of August 20 was instructive where language barrier led to a medical disaster.

Ill advice
The government’s position not to negotiate while the doctors were on strike was ill-advised and I will tell you why. If the traffic light shows green at you and red for the articulated truck, but the latter jumps the red, will you insist on legality and say you have the right of way? If he crushes into you and you die, everybody will say ‘that was a foolish death,’ especially as you were not smart enough to recognise that by insisting on your small right of way, you were sacrificing your bigger right to life. That was the ill-advised position the government took.

There are, at least, three ways of solving everyday practical problems: Through legalities, the rule of the jungle or traditional wisdom of common sense. If you slap me using these three approaches, I can either invoke legalities (including going to court) to settle scores, beat you up if I can (rule of the jungle where might is right) or apply traditional wisdom and sit down with you to resolve our differences. This needless impasse could have been resolved by anybody from my or your village using traditional wisdom.

Refusal to negotiate while insisting on legality led to unnecessary deaths. One reason why the government did not want to negotiate was that other workers would jump in if the government conceded. Again, that shows how wrong it was to have leaked out the details of the negotiation to the public.

The impasse told me how much we lack negotiation and mediation skills as a nation. How come no eminent personality or institution with the credibility, integrity and neutrality showed up to mediate, at least early enough? Are we short of such Daniels in Ghana?

Belligerence and sheer show of power
In going forward, we do not pray for such standoff again but in the event of such, government needs to shed off belligerence and sheer show of power, don the hat of traditional wisdom, call the aggrieved party to the negotiation table and within two days, resolve the issue. Important things require important attention, failing which they become urgent.

If feuding parties by themselves fail to sit down to talk, the law provides for the Labour Commission to mediate and it should have the guts to do proper mediation. Failing that, as the National Labour Commission failed in this case, the National House of Chiefs, Catholic Bishops Conference, National Peace Council, Christian Council, Council of Pentecostal and Charismatic Churches, professional bodies like the Bar Association, Institutions of Architects, Engineers, Planners, Ghana Journalists Association, Parliamentary Select Committee on Health, Parliament itself, Committee of Vice Chancellors, Muslim Council, Commission on Human Rights and Administrative Justice (CHRAJ), and other such respectable institutions, should step in.

In this case, the Labour Commission and mediation gurus lost their moral authority by compromising on their stand as they hastily proclaimed the doctors guilty. By their prejudiced judgment that the strike action was illegal when they had all the opportunity in the world to call the two parties to mediation and they did not, they lacked the credibility to mediate – at that time. Now better late than never.

Doctors are not asking for COS for this year, and even if they were, the argument that one cannot spend outside the budget did not hold in this case. Unbudgeted expenditure have been made and are being made. If there is an emergency today one will not insist on budgetary allocation yet what happened was an emergency; a situation that could kill thousands. If this was not an emergency, what else is? How were we going to finance the ‘importation’ of the Cuban doctors? From budgeted funds? Our doctors are back. Let us be sincere enough and work out their deserved COS and factor it in the 2016 budget.