BY Mayowa Tijani
More than 400 health workers at the front lines of combating Ebola in Sierra Leone have embarked on an industrial action to express displeasure over non-payment of hazard allowances.
The health workers, who include nurses, porters and cleaners, are protesting the failure of the government to pay an agreed weekly $100 (about N16,900) hazard allowance.
All of them are from a clinic in Bandajuma near Bo, the only Ebola treatment centre in southern Sierra Leone.
The Bandajuma clinic is currently run by medical charity, Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), also known as Doctors Without Borders, which said it would be forced to close the facility if the strike continued.
Ewald Stars, MSF’s emergency coordinator in Sierra Leone, told the BBC that about 60 patients had been left unattended to because of the strike at the clinic in Bandajuma, saying the international staff at the clinic could not keep the clinic open on their own.
Mohamed Mbawah, a representative of the striking Sierra Leonean staff, said his colleagues had already turned away one ambulance with affected citizens.
While speaking at a protest outside the clinic, the aggrieved workers said the government agreed to the hazard allowance when the facility was established, but had refused to make any payments since September.
The World Health Organisation (WHO) has declared the Ebola outbreak a global health emergency.
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