• Security agents clash with protesting
health officials

• Govt insists on sustaining directive

Doctors and other medical workers in the employ of the suspended Imo State health agencies, who were allegedly brutalised by officials of the state-owned Security Network, have appealed to the Federal Government to come to their aid.

Protesters at the Imo Specialist Hospital, Umuguma, Owerri West, on Tuesday, took to their heels when security operatives, who came to enforce the transfer of the facility to concessionaires, shoot into the air, chasing the workers away.

The medical officials have been protesting their disengagement from service at health facilities across the state over the concessioning of the facilities to private concerns.

One of the doctors, a medical officer at the Ihitte-Uboma Local Council General Hospital, Dr. Victor Ofili, was allegedly beaten to stupor by security operatives, and is said to be responding to treatment in an undisclosed hospital in the state.

It would be recalled that the Imo State Secretary to the Government, Jude Ejiogu, issued a directive few days ago, suspending workers’ salary in 19 parastatals, effective from January 4, for alleged ‘unproductivity.’

Chairman of the Nigerian Medical Association (NMA), Dr. Hyacinth Emele, who made a distress call to The Guardian on Monday night, said there were attempts by officials of the Imo Security Network in conjunction with some officers of the state police command, to detain Ofili on the orders of the supervising medical official of Ochiedike Dialysis Health institution in Owerri, Dr. Ifeanyi Nwachukwu.

The order, according to Emele, was for alleged refusal to allow for the concessionaires to take over the facility, as directed by the state government.

Meanwhile, as criticism continues to trail the disengagement of the workers of 19 agencies in the state public service, government has insisted that the decision would be sustained.

The Cåommissioner for Information, Youth and Sports, Chief Chidi Ibe, and the Special Adviser to the Governor on Technical Matters, Ikenna Eme, said the option of suspending workers in the affected parastatals without salary, effective, January 4, was the best economic planning direction in the spate of sharp drop in financial inflow to the state.

They also maintained that the agencies’ workers were consistently ‘unproductive’ against the objectives of setting them abinitio.