NAMIBIA BASED ZAMBIAN NURSES EJECTED

ZAMBIAN nurses working in the neighbouring Namibia have been told to terminate their contracts and return to their home country so that their positions could be given to the locals.

A group calling itself the Namibian unemployed registered nurses, warned Zambian nurses together with other foreign health workers to terminate their contracts or risk facing unspecified action.

According to information obtained by the Daily Nation, the group which comprised more than 300 unemployed nursing graduates had given the foreign nurses employed by the Namibian government until 30 July 2018 to resign and pave way for Namibians.

One of the affected Zambian nurses, who worked at a hospital in the northern part of the country, told a local newspaper, The Namibian that she was still waiting for the good standing certificate from the Health Professions Council of Namibia so she could leave the country.

She added that her contract ended last week but says she could not apply anywhere else without the letter.

“People (foreign nurses) want to leave but the papers aren’t done,” she said.

In a press statement last week, the Namibian unemployed registered nurses, said the foreign nurses working in Namibian hospitals should understand, and terminate their contracts.

“It is difficult for a qualified nurse to spend more than seven months without practising as this will lead to forgetting, and clinical negligence at work,” the group said in the statement signed by group spokesperson Junius Shilunga.

He said this was a collective decision, and that the move to ask foreign nurses to quit should not be looked at as them being antipan-Africanist.

By last August, 314 foreign nurses were working in Namibia out of 714 foreign professionals, according to Namibia’s health ministry. The aggrieved nursing graduates were not absorbed into the health sector after the government froze posts in April this year because of the cuts in the national budget. To accommodate Namibian nurses, the government also said it would not renew foreign nurses’ contracts that were due to expire by 1 September 2017.

Health Minister Bernard Haufiku has, however, backed down on the decision not to renew foreign nurses’ contracts.

He told the media on May 17 that the decision announced by his former permanent secretary Andreas Mwoombola last year dishonoured an agreement Namibia had signed with Kenya and Zimbabwe.