By Barely six months after Nigeria’s health sector unions called off an 84-day strike, the country’s largest labour body is warning that the same dispute could flare up again if the government doesn’t move faster.
In a letter dated August 6 and addressed to the Minister of Labour and Employment, Nigeria Labour Congress President Joe Ajaero pressed the government to urgently revive stalled talks with the Joint Health Sector Unions, cautioning that continued delay risks tipping the sector back into industrial crisis. The letter came in response to a July 31 message from JOHESU itself, in which the union voiced growing frustration over how slowly its core demand — an overdue adjustment to the Consolidated Health Salary Structure — was being addressed.
Ajaero’s letter framed the grievance as one that has outlasted successive rounds of paperwork without delivering results. Health workers, he wrote, have watched agreement after agreement signed and then quietly shelved, left waiting on promises that never quite convert into action. He asked the minister to personally push for negotiations to resume and to lean on the Presidential Committee on Salaries to move the process forward, warning in blunt terms that letting talks collapse entirely would carry consequences serious enough to speak for themselves.
Notably, Ajaero was careful to frame the letter as an appeal rather than an ultimatum, but he didn’t leave much doubt about where the NLC would stand if patience runs out. Should JOHESU ultimately decide it has no choice but to act again, he wrote, the wider labour congress would throw its full weight behind the union.
A Dispute a Decade in the Making
The current standoff traces back to CONHESS, the salary framework covering non-doctor health professionals, which JOHESU says has gone without the kind of periodic review that its counterpart for doctors, CONMESS, has received multiple times since 2014. The union’s position, reinforced by a 2021 technical committee report that has yet to be fully implemented, is that the imbalance has left thousands of health workers underpaid relative to colleagues doing comparable work.
That frustration boiled over into an indefinite strike beginning in November 2025, one of the longest health-sector shutdowns in recent memory, lasting 84 days before JOHESU agreed to suspend it in February 2026 on the strength of a fresh settlement with the government. The NLC and Trade Union Congress had separately escalated the pressure in January, issuing the government a 14-day ultimatum over the same unimplemented adjustment.
For its part, the Federal Government has pointed to an ongoing job evaluation exercise, being carried out by the National Salaries, Incomes and Wages Commission, which it says is intended to properly determine where health professionals should sit on the pay scale, the outcome of which, the Ministry of Health and Social Welfare has said, will form the basis for reopening collective bargaining talks.
Watching to See What Comes Next
Whether that process moves quickly enough to satisfy JOHESU, and to keep the NLC from making good on its pledge of support, remains an open question. With the February settlement’s terms only partially realised and a fresh warning now on record, the coming weeks are likely to determine whether Nigeria’s health sector heads toward another disruptive standoff or finds a way to finally close a gap that has persisted for more than ten years.
