In Nigeria's capital city of Abuja, doctors battling the novel coronavirus pandemic are struggling to feed.
“We’ve been fighting to have them pay our daily inducement allowances which are N50,000 for doctors, N30,000 for nurses, pharmacists and laboratory scientists; and N20,000 for hygienists (cleaners) since June”, says Doctor *Adaeze Kenechukwu who is still in scrubs.
All healthcare workers at all the COVID-19 isolation centers in Abuja haven't been paid for three months; and the dour, somber mood in Karu is replicated across the federal capital.
Kenechukwu, a young doctor, remembers the day she volunteered to join the healthcare force battling the novel pandemic in Africa’s most populous country.
At the time, it seemed like the most patriotic thing to do. The most logical thing to do. The most pragmatic decision she had ever taken.
She remembers accepting to put her life on the line for the green and white.
“When this whole thing started, they announced that they needed volunteers. The most important thing for the volunteers was that you have to be working in whatever city it is that they are going to have the isolation centers and get the volunteer health workers.
“So, it doesn’t matter if you are with the federal government, it doesn’t matter if you are with the FCTA (Federal Capital Territory Authority), it doesn’t matter if you are private.
"The most important thing was that you were working within the FCT. So, a lot of people volunteered, right?”, she says, as she yanks off her gloves meticulously. And hurls them into a nearby bin with some venom.
“And so, Acting Secretary Dr Kawu goes on NTA or ChannelsTV and says we are going to pay doctors this amount of money daily.
The whole thing got political after the payment was announced. I was one of the first people who got trained. My batch was the second or third to be deployed.
“Because it got very political, Asokoro decided to give us the whole hospital for use as an isolation center. So they forced people working at the FCTA to go into this isolation center.
"Many of them didn’t want to, obviously because in the beginning, people were dying of this virus quite a lot outside of Nigeria. It was a scary virus to battle.
“Our health systems are so poor, so the healthcare workers thought they were not going to survive this. People didn’t want to volunteer because they were scared for their lives and understandably so.
But we were just like, 'you know what? As long as we do what we are supposed to do, let’s go! If we don’t volunteer, nobody is going to take care ouof " Socitizeno, Asokoro goes like four weeks "So, before us. Most of them were people working in Asokoro. They were the second batch of trainees.
“Those of us who got trained in the first batch, waited for eight weeks before we were deployed. So, Asokoro goes in the first month and we were deployed in Karu.
“Asokoro, Gwagwalada and Karu were the first set of isolation centers to be opened. Most of us in Karu were like private, FCTA staff as well as federal government staff. We started working in May. Sometime in the middle of June, the money stopped coming. People started asking questions about payment,” she says.
No official has explained why the money has stopped coming, even though Nigeria continues to rack up and report more and more COVID-19 cases by the day. Abuja has the most COVID-19 cases outside Nigeria's commercial capital city of Lagos.
Kenechukwu recalls now, with a balled fist, how they were told that their services were no longer required and discarded like rags, after being owed and starved for months.
“By the way, this is the second time they have paid Asokoro healthcare workers their inducement allowance.
“We worked for the whole of June, the whole of July--the money we got in June was for May, because we started working in May.
"The whole of June, we didn’t hear anything, the whole of July, nothing. So we started wondering what was going on, why are you not paying us?
“And they were like, ‘don’t worry, just continue working, we are going to pay you, there is no money right now…
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