Health Minister is 'ignorant' – Bonded nurses

The Coalition of Unemployed Bonded Diploma Nurses has expressed outrage at the Minister of Health, Kwaku Agyeman-Manu, over comments that its members’ postings were delayed because most of them had failed their exams.

The nurses, comprising psychiatric nurses, general nurses, and midwives, on Monday April 24 picketed the ministry to pile further pressure on the government to accelerate their recruitment, saying they had remained jobless having left school in 2015 and since completing their national service in August 2016.

The nurses, numbering over 150, only agreed to go home on Wednesday April 26, having spent two nights sleeping rough at the ministry’s car park to press home their demands.

The move, they said, had been instigated after an assurance by Mr Agyeman-Manu to them in late March to resolve their issue within two weeks had elapsed with no word from the minister.

Mr Agyeman-Manu, responding to the nurses’ claim, told Ghana Yensom on Accra100.5FM in an interview on Thursday May 4 that most of the nurses had actually failed their final examinations and only passed after re-sitting, for which reason their financial clearance from the Ministry of Finance had delayed while their colleagues who passed theirs and graduated that same year had had their postings processed earlier.

Reacting to the Minister’s assertion in an interview with Class News, the spokesperson of the unemployed bonded nurses, Tina Mireku, said Mr Agyeman-Manu was “ignorant”.

“We’ve done our service, we have our PIN (Personal Identification Number], we have our licences, what else is preventing the ministry from posting us? Even if we failed, we have passed. What is preventing him from ordering the Ministry of Finance to [clear] us? What sort of minister is this? The minister is ignorant,” she said.