JUTH CMD booed as tenure ends

By Kingsley Chukwuka

The immediate past Medical Director of the Jos University Teaching Hospital (JUTH), Prof. Edmund Banwat, was booed for non performance as his tenure ended yesterday December 31, 2021.

Banwat was booed by the Joint Health Section Unions of the hospital (JOHESU), who carried placards with various inscriptions such as, “An end to the era of lack of consumables”, “An end to an era of referring patients to other  secondary hospitals”, “An end has come to the none implementations of circulars”, “The pharaoh of our time is gone”, etc.

Speaking with journalists, the Chairman of JOHESU, Mr. Adams Ebuga, who is also the Chairman of the Non-Academic Staff Union of Education and Associated Institutions (NASU), JUTH branch, said the various unions were excited over the end of the alleged tyrannical eight years tenure of Mr. Banwat and organised a thanksgiving march to commemorate it.

According to him: “The thanksgiving is all about the exit of a dictator, a monster in human flesh, a Pharaoh of our time.

“It was only God that kept us for these eight years during his tenure as CMD. All the structures he met onboard are now dilapidated. In his eight years we experienced a situation where JUTH a referral hospital was now referring patients to private hospitals for various tests and diagnoses because machines and other equipments are broken down or non functional.

“Anytime we go to him to complain these issues, he will always say, we are looking into it and for eight years he was looking into it without resolving any of the problems.

“Staff have been stagnated for eight years without promotion. Cleaners have been working for 30 months and have not been paid salaries and yet he did nothing about it.

“Today we celebrate the fact that his tenure has come to an end”, Ebuga said.

However, the JOHESU Chairman advise that hospitals should be manned by administrators for the proactive running of the hospitals.

He pointed out there were people who studied hospital administration; saying that such qualifications should be the best people to handle a hospital affairs.

“Even if a medical Doctor would be picked to manage hospitals, it should be someone vast in the administrative sphere and not a novice.

“Before the tenure of an incumbent CMD is renewed, an assessment should be done to assess the performance of the CMD within the hospital.

“Health care is a right and not a privilege, and as such, the federal government should not privatise the health sector as health care would be above the reach of the common man”, Ebuga said.

Our correspondent reports that when contacted for response, the phone number of the immediate past CMD was switched off.