The Nigerian Medical Association (NMA) has roundly condemned the recent bilateral deal by the Federal Government with Saint Lucia, which it had branded as a misplaced priority, following on the heels of the failure of the government in attending to the welfare of the country’s health workers at home.
Even just a day after issuing a 21-day ultimatum over long-standing complaints, the NMA was caught off guard by the move to deploy Nigerian doctors, educators, and agric specialists abroad, and on a deal where the Nigerian state will remunerate each doctor ₦40.8 million annually to practice in Saint Lucia. This is much more than Nigerian doctors get back home, at ₦11.9 million annually, according to the NMA.
The contract, initialed by President Bola Tinubu, has brought severe indignation among physicians, particularly when the majority of physicians in Nigeria are made to subsist through delayed payment, subhuman working conditions, and non-enforcement of contracts for welfare and hazard pay.
In a secretary general’s press release of the NMA, Dr Benjamin Egbo, the union referred to the pay gap as “outrageous and unjust.” He went on to explain that Nigerian doctors who are exported not only earn around four times their domestic counterparts, but even the Saint Lucia government compensates its doctors an outrageous ₦131.7 million per year, a figure that raises Nigeria’s management of its healthcare workers into further question.
Whereas NMA accepted the foreign alliances as a fait accompli, it insisted that there must be prior ranking of domestic duties. “You cannot build diplomatic goodwill on the backs of the very professionals who are underpinning your healthcare system,” Egbo stated.
He also warned that the policies would further worsen the already bad brain drain in Nigeria. Nigerian doctors numbering thousands have, in recent years, left Nigeria to get better pay, improved working conditions, and respect by their peers, care now increasingly out of reach in Nigerian government hospitals.
Egbo said that the NMA, in its 21-day ultimatum notice to the government on July 2, 2025, demanded some of the lingering issues be resolved. They are withdrawal of the controversial circular by the National Salaries, Incomes and Wages Commission (NSIWC), payment of arrears in allowances, implementation of agreed salary scales like CONMESS, and improved conditions of service for resident and senior doctors.
The statement made was that doctors across the entire country of Nigeria were burning out, overwhelmed, and even preventable mortality because the unsustainable workload was placed on the remaining few within the system. It’s having a direct effect on patient care as well as mortality rates across the nation.
The group concluded by announcing that it would no longer keep quiet as government policies go on to drain the same health workers day and night to heal Nigerians. To NMA, expending more foreign doctors than indigenous doctors is a wrong signal and an indicator of a deeper issue of misplaced leadership national priorities.
