By: Kelvin Chiringa
A mob of foreign trained doctors who sat for a pre-internship exam and failed have now appealed for help from the prime minister.
The doctors demonstrated their anger at Zoo-Park before heading to the offices of the PM.
They are alleging that the Health Professions Council of Namibia which set their evaluation test was an illegal entity which was not recognized by the law.
The council is set to give the students another test but that can only be possible once the High Court has dealt with their urgent court application meant to stop it.
They stressed that they would not be examined by an illegal body which did not have an education committee to set and administer their education.
The doctors made negative headlines when of the more than 100 of them that set for the test only two passed.
According to them, this serves to show that the test itself was unfair.
“We do not even know who set the examination, marked it and who moderated it. We are supposed to be regulated by the Medical and Dental Council, not the so called Health Professions Council of Namibia which cannot be seen by the law,” they said.
What has even more irked them is the allegation that Unam trained doctors were not subjected to the same evaluation test, making it discriminatory.
This, according to them, “is a violation of Article 10 rights which is the right to equality”.
They have alleged in their affidavit that the test was unfair in that the council changed the scope of the exam from four domains to six within 21 days.
They further allege that instead of the normal 100 questions they are required to tackle within three hours, they were made to answer 300 without changing the time limit.
“This means that we had to spend 1.2 minutes per question. This is practically impossible as the process requires reading, analyzing and understanding the question before one shades the answer on a separate answer sheet,” they claimed.
The students have told the PM that their case was not that they did not want to be evaluated, but simply want to be treated the same way as Unam graduates.
As such they seek to have the oncoming test stopped.
They want the PM to call on the council to “hear our grievances”, to set an education committee, to prevent their being thrown on the streets for lack of employment
