Fed up with the inactivity of the Government in paying their salaries, local government workers came together under their union and wrote to the Nigerian Union of Local Government Employees (NULGE) lamenting the non-payment of salaries.
According to the letter, the local government workers are being owed between 10-19 months arrears of salary. This comes after a representative of the Yobe state government claimed that workers were no longer being owed.
You can read the letter below.
National President,
National union of local government employees,
Abuja.
Dear Sir,
NON- PAYMENT OF OUR SALARIES
This is to draw your kind attention to the fact that local government workers from Nangere (1360 workers), Fika (2100 workers), Potiskum (590 workers), Fune (140 workers) and Tarmuwa (190 workers) local government areas of Yobe state have not been paid their salaries for the past 10-19 months, and request your help in resolving it, since we are unable to get helpful response from our state level NULGE (a copy of our recent letter is enclosed), we are turning to you as a last resort, we trust you will look in to this matter and see proper action is taken to preserve justice as the NULGE mission stated ‘a union that provides equal opportunity to its members through participation of all and where professionalism, social justice, job security and welfare of its members shall be paramount’.
Series of workers verification have taken place between October 2015 to December 2016 throughout local government areas of Yobe State on the direction of the State government, however the workers verification were marred by irregularities, lack of transparency and wrongful omission of genuine workers from staff payroll (as confirmed by the state government spokesman Abdullahi Bego, Sahara reporters, 6th March, 2017), Meanwhile the information available to us is that the state government in collaboration with local government chairmen are discreetly trying to sack unsuspecting workers, so as to have enough money to execute what they called developmental projects, despite not employing for the past 11 years, in as much as we are in support of developmental projects, but it should not be to the detriment of workers welfare. Our reasons
- Firstly the workers verification that took place between October 2015 to January 2016, which resulted in dubiously removing hundreds of genuine workers mostly junior staff from staff payroll after they have been duly cleared by the audit committee
- Secondly, other workers verification followed in July 2016, in which the victims of the first verification were denied access to the committee and excluded from the exercise, many other genuine workers were deliberately removed thereafter.
- Surprisingly after the 2nd verification, permanent secretary local government and chieftaincy affairs said in a statement reported by leadership newspaper of 2nd September 2016 that the state government have discovered that 75% of local government workers had their letters of appointment backdated, hence they were sacked.
- Moreover in December 2016, after so much pressure from different quarters, the state government reluctantly set up another committee to rectify the anomalies caused by its deliberate actions.
- To our utter dismay on 7th February, 2017 Alhaji Mala Musti the commissioner for information and culture in an interview with V.O.A Hausa morning service said the state government was not owing anybody salaries and that it had settled all outstanding salaries.
- It was after we issued a press statement debunking the commissioner’s claim that the state government on 6th March, 2017 through its spokesman Abdullahi Bego hurriedly provided clarification on the matter, where he claimed that the December 2016 committee had just concluded their work and that the state governor was at that time waiting for the report to work on it. However after above two months now the said report is still with the committee, which confirmed our fears, that verification was just a smokescreen to divert attention to the state government’s inability to pay salaries, and then used the opportunity to sack unsuspecting workers, it is disheartening this is coming when the Federal government is doing everything to curb Boko Haram insurgency and control the humanitarian crises in the northeast.
Finally on behalf of the 300 workers who signed this petition we present
this to you requesting you to kindly help us get justice, we are sure you will see urgency in this request and take proper action. We have enclosed with this letter some appointment letters of our members.
Thank you
Yours sincerely
Muhammad Ja’afar
Secretary