Immediate past national president of the Nigeria Medical Association, NMA, Osahon Enabulele has carpeted Nigeria’s President, Goodluck Ebele Jonathan for what he described as the “cavalier attitude” with which the memory of Stella Ameyo Adadevoh and other health workers who died in the line of duty as a result of the outbreak of the Ebola Virus Disease in the country, was treated in the presidential Independence Day broadcast this morning.
Enabulele believed post-humous awards should have been conferred on the deceased health workers at last Monday’s national awards ceremony in Abuja. The former NMA president who felt disappointed, saddened and pained that the recent national honors awards list missed out the names of these deceased heroic health workers, said he was deeply shocked that “the opportunity of President Goodluck Ebele Jonathan’s Independence day speech was not used to reassure Nigerians of the possible plans by the Federal Government to bestow national recognition and post-humous honors on the humane, industrious and God-fearing Dr (Mrs) Stella Ameyo Adadevoh and other health workers felled by the Ebola Virus Disease in the course of passionately caring for the late Liberian, Mr. Patrick Sawyer, reputed to have imported Ebola Virus into Nigeria”.
Enabulele was concerned that in the face of “the miserable monthly hazard allowance of N5,000” paid to medical doctors/dentists and other health workers in Nigeria, the “non-recognition of Dr. (Mrs) Stella Ameyo Adadevoh and other fallen health workers may act as
further disincentive to already demoralized medical and health workforce in Nigeria, with tremendous implications for health service delivery”.
The former number one doctor in the country however, appreciated the president for his accomplishments thus far and his “recent unique conferment of National honors on ordinary unsung and hardworking Nigerians, including the designer of Nigeria’s national flag”. Enabulele, while calling on the president to declare to Nigerians, the Federal Government’s plans “to memorialize and bestow post-hummus honors on all the health workers and other volunteers felled in the course of caring for Ebola Virus Disease patients in Nigeria”, asserted that surely, the expeditious conferment of these honors, would add to the list of accomplishments presented by the president in his October 1st, 2014 Independence Day address.
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