Doctors walk past women with lying in a ward of the Lagos Island Maternity Hospital in Lagos, Nigeria, via Flickr photo by Sunday Alamba/Commonwealth Secretariat / CC BY-NC 2.0. Doctors in Lagos State embarked on a three-day strike from July 13 to 15, to protest the absence of adequate safety and welfare measures for doctors working with COVID-19 patients. The Premium Times online newspaper reported that Oluwajimi Sodipo, head of the Lagos Doctors Guild, announced the strike at a press briefing on July 12, in protest of the disparity between COVID-19 hazard allowances for Lagos doctors and their colleagues in federal hospitals. Doctors working in Lagos coronavirus isolation centres also lacked sufficient Personal Protective Equipment (PPE), health insurance and were also owed two months’ salary, Sodipo said. The Guild exempted doctors working in the state isolation centres from joining the collective action. As of July 21, Nigeria had recorded 37,225 confirmed cases of COVID-19, 15,333 recoveries and 801 deaths. Lagos State, the country’s most densely populated state, is the epicentre of the disease, with 13,538 confirmed cases, 1,964 recoveries and 176 deaths. The Lagos State government on July 13 appealed to the frontline medical workers to return to work. The doctors suspended their strike on July 16, due to the “positive disposition” shown by the Lagos State government to their demands. Strike action by Nigerian medical doctors has become an annual occurrence in Africa’s most populous country. Their grievances are always the same: a demand for increased welfare measures and protection in order to do their jobs better. The sequencing of the government's response is equally predictable: initially, it’s high -handed, with a threat to sack the striking doctors if they don’t return to work. Then it usually backfires, forcing the government to back down and concede to the doctors’ demands. This pattern of events has remained consistent even in the face of a global public health crisis. In mid-2014, Nigerian resident doctors (those undergoing specialist training) went on strike during the Ebola epidemic over welfare demands. The Nigerian government responded by terminating their appointments, then later soft-pedaled and blamed the media for misrepresenting the facts of the matter. Nigerian Resident doctors @nard_nigeria are starting their strike today,after weeks of trying to get the government to act Support them ,put your tweets where your mouths are They are the lifeblood of our hospitals , especially for specialised services. — Femi (@0gbeni) June 15, 2020 Six years later, on June 15, resident doctors again went on strike during a major public health crisis to protest poor working conditions and inadequate — or unpaid — welfare measures provided for those working on COVID-19. Twitter user Dr. Nma Halliday sarcastically compares the ridiculously low monthly health hazard allowance given to Nigerian doctors (60,000 naira, or about $144 USD per year) with the annual newspaper and hardship allowances paid to Nigerian legislators, which amount to 1.2 million naira ($3,000 USD) and 1.24 million naira ($3,200 USD] respectively: Before you remind doctors to take quaker oat for breakfast, just remember that the newspaper allowance for the lawmakers is 1.2 million naira & Hardship Allowance is 1.24 million naira. But a doctor’s hazard allowance with covid19, HIV, Hepatitis B etc is 5,000 naira only? Wawu — Nma Halliday MD (@nma_halliday) June 20, 2020 True to form, the government threatened yet again to sack the doctors when negotiations ended in a deadlock on June 17. But the doctors resisted the intimidation and stood their ground. The strike was eventually called off on June 22, following the intervention of state governors and federal legislators. University College Hospital, Ibadan is the first teaching hospital in Nigeria via Hizick27 / Wikimedia Commons / CC-BY-SA-4.0. During Nigeria’s COVID-19 crisis, some government funds, allegedly given to a teaching hospital in southwestern Nigeria, became an object of controversy. What started as a routine press briefing about the matter quickly degenerated into denials and counter-accusations. On June 23, Akinola Ojo, health commissioner in Oyo State, southwestern Nigeria, announced that the state government had spent 2.7 billion naira ($6.9 million USD) in their fight against COVID-19. According to the financial daily BusinessDay, Ojo stated that part of the expenditure included the 118 million naira ($304,000 USD) “given” to the University College Hospital (UCH), Ibadan “as support.” But the following day, on UCH’s Facebook page, the hospital denied having received any COVID-19 funding from the Oyo State Government.