LUTH doctors injured as mgt eject them from secretariat

Many resident doctors were injured in the face-off between security operatives at the Lagos University Teaching Hospital (LUTH), Idi-Araba, in the early hours of Wednesday.

According to some of those who spoke to our correspondent, LUTH’s management had sent security personnel to take over their secretariat around 2 am.

The chairman LUTH’s Association of Resident Doctors (ARD), Dr. Adebayo Sekunmade, said that although the management had served them two notice to quit the secretariat, they had pleaded with the authorities to give them time to get an alternative venue.

Sekunmade said: “We were in a meeting at the secretariat around 10 pm on Tuesday, when we were alerted to the fact that security operatives were outside to evict us. We stayed there till 2 am. When they got tired of waiting, they left.

“But they came back around 10 am and attacked those who tried to go inside the secretariat to pick their books and other belongings. They (the security personnel) came and chased some of us out, and many people got bruises and injured in the process.

“We’ve been appealing to the management to give us time to get another place. We had sent many letters after they gave us eviction notices to make our stand known.”
He accused the LUTH management of victimising doctors, saying, they were the only body that has been sacked from their secretariat at the tertiary hospital.

Sekunmade described the notice as “illegal” adding that it was not issued by any competent court.

“No other association was served an eviction notice. We have been here since 1985; and the space was not given to us by this management. We were only given a memo, for an eviction notice to be legal, it must be from a court,” he stated.

Our correspondent gathered that the chairman, LUTH Medical Advisory Committee, Prof. Femi Fasanmade, who addressed the aggrieved doctors after the incident, said that the space was to be converted to a crucial unit to serve patients better at the hospital.