Our accounts are still empty – Trainee nurses remind Bawumia after failed promise
Trainee nurses have yet to receive their thirteen months’ allowance arrears despite the government’s assurance a week ago that the money would hit their accounts by Thursday, May 16, 2024.
Vice President Dr Mahamudu Bawumia, addressing nurses and midwives in Accra on Tuesday, May 14, 2024, announced that the Ministry of Finance had approved GH¢177million to clear all nursing trainee allowance arrears by Thursday, May 16, 2024.
The president of the Ghana Nurses and Midwives Trainees Association (GNMTA), Pascal Adumbisa, confirmed that the trainee nurses have not received the pledged allowances and added that the members have had enough of the back-and-forth discussion on the government’s payment of arrears.
“For now, we have not received any updates regarding the allowance. There is usually clear-cut communication about the payment, which is the date the allowance will be paid to our members. When you look at it, I would say we have had enough of this.
“Even the Vice President, in his statement, indicated that the allowance was supposed to be paid on Thursday. We have not had any information or updates regarding the payment. We have not had any update on whether the money was released to the Controller and Accountant General’s Department for the students to be paid,” he noted in an interview monitored by The Ghana Report on Citi News.
The nursing trainee allowance, which has been in arrears for months and has led to a series of protests by the health workers, was reintroduced by the Akufo-Addo administration after it was abolished in 2014.
Former President John Mahama, under the umbrella of the opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC), scrapped the teacher and nursing trainee allowances, justifying that it was necessary to use the money to invest in education infrastructure.
Following the government’s reintroduction of the nursing trainee allowance, the Ghana Nurse-Midwife Trainees’ Association (GNMTA) have been mounting intense pressure on the government to settle their arrears.
According to GNMTA’s leadership, all efforts to get the government, through the Ministry of Health, to settle the arrears have proven futile.