Governor Ayodele Fayose of Ekiti State
It was pandemonium in Ekiti State as labour leaders on Friday
stormed the old Governor’s Office in Ado-Ekiti, the state secretariat
and other government offices to flog and chase away civil servants who
defied a strike order.
This is coming after organised labour on Thursday embarked on an
indefinite strike to demand the payment of the outstanding five months
salaries of workers.
But, some workers had defied the order of labour leaders that all
workers should proceed on an indefinite strike. As a result, members of
the organised labour took the workers, who had defied the directive of
the labour leaders, by surprise when they swooped on them around 12noon.
According to Punch, it was revealed that when the labour leaders
met some workers who had resumed work at the offices, they were 'lightly
caned'.
Speaking about the incident, one of the workers who wants to be anonymous said: “We were busy when the picketing team came in and forced us out of the office.
“Initially, we wanted to resist them but they brought out canes and started dragging us out of the offices.”
The Ekiti State Chairman of the Nigeria Labour Congress, Mr. Raymond Adesanmi, confirmed the incident.
He said, “They are saboteurs. We all agreed to go on strike at
our meeting, so anyone who defied the strike order is a saboteur. They
should bear the consequence of their action because we are fighting for
general interest.”
The strike is coming after organised labour's 48-hour-ultimatum
expired for Governor Ayodele Fayose to pay workers’ salary deductions
for December 2015.
The workers’ demands also include the release of the staff audit
and verification conducted in April 2015, disclosure of the state
monthly internally generated revenue, payment of arrears of five months
salaries pension and gratuities, payment of September 2014 salary to
primary school teachers and payment of 2014 and 2015 leave bonuses.
Others include implementation of promotion for 2013, 2014, 2015,
approval of inter-cadre transfer, remission of 10 per cent IGR to local
government and stoppage of Joint Allocation Committee’s account,
resuscitation of Local Government staff pension fund and release of
running grants.
But the governor had explained that the workers’ monthly wage bill
was over N2.6bn and that the he only got a paltry allocation of N751m in
April. He also revealed that 1.5bn is being deducted from his
allocation every month as a result of debts owed by his predecessor, as a
result of that, he has been unable to pay salaries.
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