When Picketing Pays

It did not have to take doctors to picket at the façade of the Controller and Accountant General's Department for the authorities to make a promise to address their concerns.

As a bad precedence, we should expect a future recurrence from other aggrieved public servants whose remunerations are delayed by government.

Remuneration of workers – doctors inclusive – should never be toyed with as has been the case for some time now, even though spurious justifications have been adduced for the anomalies.

When the junior doctors expressed their opprobrium over the delay in releasing their dues to them, their pleas hit dead ends, with the authorities pretending not to hear them. They went ahead to issue an ultimatum which was similarly ignored.

For them to do what they did therefore was suggestive of their hitting the end of the road. Their seniors will soon make the pages of newspapers and the airwaves when the deadline they too announced is due.

Their threat to resign en masse sounded ominous, considering its effect on an already overstretched medical delivery system in the country. While some skeptics wonder why their protest can take such extreme form and therefore infeasible, others think that they can make good such a threat and public medical facilities will be the loser.

We have often heard isolated complaints of the threats being overplayed by the doctors and wish to state that this is an unfortunate attempt at pouring water over the concerns of the doctors – junior and senior. These are genuine complaints which must be addressed for the sake of equity.

Public servants who react to their delayed remunerations and when their allowances are frozen, see and hear about the incessant looting of the public kitty by politicians and can hardly therefore be told to sacrifice and wait for their reward in heaven as teachers were once told.

So much money goes into the training of doctors and other professionals that treating them the way the state does is not in the interest of boosting morale. Under such circumstances, productivity suffers tremendously.

The antagonism that is triggered when workers and government haggle over remunerations is infectious and soon spreads to other departments previously untouched by such agitations, impacting negatively upon our fragile economy.

When promises are made they must be fulfilled to enhance trust between representatives of the state and aggrieved workers. These days government is hardly trusted when it makes promises to pay outstanding dues and remunerations of workers.

Little wonder that the junior doctors digested what they were told when they stormed the Controller and Accountant General's Department with a pinch of salt. Their mistrust is informed by previous many unfulfilled promises. Will government make good its promises this time?