500 bona fide workers of Borno govt yet to receive salaries in ten months

Almost five hundred workers who have been assessed physically in the ongoing ghost hunt in Borno state are yet to be captured by the biometrics to put their thumbprints into the salary data says the chair of the NLC Titus Abana.

The Ghost workers massive hunt instituted by the Borno state government was aimed at stopping few people mostly in the various accounts department from gulping millions of naira in connivance with some management staff as has been revealed by the verification team.

The sad aspect of this development according to the chair of the Nigerian labour congress in the state is that these workers who are being delayed for what the verification committee calls technical reasons are being owed as much as nine months even as the waiting game continues.

“You can imagine what can happen to my people if they are being owed from three to ten months of salary and yet he or she has a family looking up to them for survival. It is painful, and off course the brunt to help falls on us.”

“The Labour has actively participated in all the physical verification exercises and we see no reason why the biometric capture is so slow to clear these people and stop the pains they are causing them. We have been arguing with the Governor that all workers that have been captured physically about 19,500 of them, except those outside the country studying, should be paid their sweat.”

“The biometrics is a major challenge. It is too slow. They are not helping us at all by being so sluggish. This sluggishness has affected between 300 and 500 of our members who are yet to be captured in the current verification. We are saying that as long as you have been captured physically you should be paid pending the biometrics.”

On the minimum wage for local government workers, the chairman said, he believes that the government must change their fate soonest because some changes have been done to some of them.

According to him, about six local government areas are remaining including Chibok, Hawul, Askira, Biu which have not been well taken care of in the line-up for 18,000 minimum salaries adding that they do have a lot of challenges and they do hope that they would be able to handle them by the grace of God.

The NLC have since been asking the political leaders in the country to shift the minimum wage from 18,000 to 56,000 naira so that the common man will at least survive under this recession but the federal and state governments are yet to bulge over the issue which has become a ticking time bomb.