– NLC chairman among 9000 people
fired in Kogi state
– Says he is still baffled by the
outcome of the screening that identified him as a ghost worker
– Insists that the workers are
not illegal and the NLC could bring them out on the street
The Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC)
chairman in Kogi state Onuh Edoka, has been fired over reports that he is a
‘ghost worker’.
Premium Times reports that the
NLC chairman is one of about 9000 people sacked in the state after a screening
exercise carried out to eject illegal workers from the 21 local government
areas of the state.
Edoka, who serves as the head of
both the Medical Health Workers Union and the NLC in the state, was reportedly
employed in 1989, and serves as a Disease and Surveillance Officer in the
state.
The NLC went on strike recently
over the fuel subsidy removal.
Speaking on the development, he
expressed his shock over the result of the screening exercise headed by Paul
Okuntimo, a retired general.
In a chat with Premium Times,
Edoka said: “The General’s committee claims that I submitted the wrong bank
statements. But they only asked for my statement of accounts for the past two
years which I submitted.
“The government just got a
bailout based on the current staff strength. Suddenly they want to retrench
workers to divert the funds even though some of these workers have not been
paid for over 23 months.
“The NLC is saying that these
people are not ghost workers. They are living beings and we are ready to bring
them out on the streets of Lokoja so that the world can see that they are not
ghosts but real workers of Kogi state.”
On the outcome of the screening
process, the media aide to Governor Yahaya Bello, Gbenga Olorunpomi stated that
it was transparent and designed to identify persons who were employed
fraudulently.
According to him: “For example,
many of them refused to supply their BVNs [Bank Verification Numbers]. This
automatically brings up the question of why they don’t have BVNs if they don’t
have anything to hide.
“The governor has assured the
people that no legitimate worker in Kogi state will be sacked. But there are
some people who got into the system fraudulently. For those people, we have no
apologies.” Meanwhile, some local government workers in the state have taken to
the streets opposing the alleged plan by the state government to sack workers
in the state’s civil service.
There are speculations within the
state civil service that some workers were intentionally denied of screening
forms and subsequently barred from the screening activities.
A group in the opposition party
in the state, PDP National Youth Frontier (PDPNYF) said the screening the
exercise was targeted at a particular category of people, full of
irregularities, marred with series of omissions.
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