The Coalition of Unemployed Bonded Diploma Nurses, comprising psychiatry nurses and general nurses, has called on President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo to fire the Minister of Health, Kwaku Agyeman-Manu, for what it terms his ineptitude.

The coalition also expressed its displeasure at government for its inability to employ its members after their national service in 2016. Numbering 937, the group said since members completed their national service in August 2016, they had remained jobless. It described government’s inability to employ them as “inhuman and heartless”.

In a press statement, the coalition said it had written several petitions to the Ministry of Health (MoH) on the matter but all had proved futile.

The coalition said it had met Mr Agyeman-Manu after its members picketed the MoH on 28 March, with the Minister urging the group’s leadership to give him two weeks to obtain clearance from the Finance Ministry for the posting of the nurses. But with the grace period elapsing Tuesday, 11th April 2017, the promise has not been fulfilled.

“The leadership and the group as a whole find it so disgusting and disheartening to sit and allow these agencies play with our future and for this reason, we are coming out in our numbers to fight for what is rightfully due us. We want to emphatically and without hesitation state that the Minister has failed us in our agreement and we, therefore, call on His Excellency the President of the Republic of Ghana to fire him because he is not a man of his word and is also exhibiting gross incompetence at his ministry,” the statement said.

The coalition said they will picket at the premises of the Ministry of Health on Monday 24 April with their “mattresses, sponges, soaps, toothpaste, and brushes to sleep there for as long as it will take us to get cleared and posted”.

The coalition noted that they received their PINs/licences as professional nurses in August 2016 which will be expiring in June 2017 and the Nurses and Midwifery Council (NMC) would expect them to pay for renewal, for which failure to do so within the stipulated time will attract a penalty.

“How do we renew these PINs when we are left languishing in our homes?” it wondered.

The coalition further mentioned that Vice President Dr Mahamudu Bawumia had not been fair to Ghanaians by telling them that government had issued a clearance to recruit 11,000 nurses in its first 100 days in office.

According to them, the February 2015 batch of diploma nurses are still battling with unemployment.