THE Joint Action Committee (JAC) of the higher institutions in Kogi State on Tuesday shutdown the various campuses in the state as they protested against non payment of salaries to some of their members.
Academic and non academic activities were paralysed in the institutions as members of the committee converged and marched round towns for the protest.
The protest at the Kogi State Polytechnic, Lokoja, the state capital started at about 8am with hundreds of the workers converging on the main entrance of the school chanting various anti government songs.
The workers, who were also with various placards, accusing government of some misconduct, momentarily blocked the Lokoja-Abuja highway with their procession.
Some of the inscriptions on the placards read “Stop media payment of salaries and pay real workers on the field”, “Injury to one is injury to all, pay our colleagues their salaries”, “teachers’ reward is also in this world”.
The protest came following the ultimatum issued to government by the committee over the alleged failure of government to pay some of their members that underwent the recently concluded screening exercise.
Addressing the protesters before the procession, the chairman of the Academic Staff Union of Polytechnic (ASUP), Sunday Boluwomi, accused the government of not paying the salaries of about 148 staff members of the institution.
He said the committee would embark on a 5-day warning strike as from next Monday if the government failed to meet their demands, adding that at the expiration of the warning strike an indefinite one would follow.
According to him, it was wrong for government to categorise their members that were available everyday as ghost workers after going through series of screening.
Boluwomi said, “If they say there are ghost workers we tell them we know genuine workers in our own place and these genuine workers have not been paid, if they have ghost workers, fine, the ones we know are not ghost, we have more than 135 staff members that have not been paid, they are not ghost, we know them, we have their records.
“You don’t do an endless screening, if you go to some other states that have done screening,
it doesn’t take them more than three months and they have results, going back memory lane, firstly, it was Okuntimo that was the chairman (of the screening committee), he was sacked, another person came on board he was sacked, Okolo is there now and up till today they don’t have result.
“Those people they said are ghost workers or that have problems, they have not been able to identify the reasons why they have not paid them, if a screening committee is set up and you wind up, you said you have concluded your screening there should be a particular report, but up till today, there is no report about Kogi State Polytechnic, the screening cannot be endless, there must be time lag that you carry out a particular screening.
“We want to say we don’t believe in any screening again, they have done the first one, the second one and the third one, everything they asked for have been submitted, yet no result, so, it cannot be an endless one, it is just a delay tactic to make sure they withdraw people unlawfully.
“If our members are not paid by Monday, we will start five days warning strike and after that we will go for indefinite one. It is the same students we are protecting that are accusing us, the same NAKOSS are the one that did not hear from us, they have their own parents somewhere and they are collecting salaries, but our members here are not paid for eight months, many of them have withdrawn their children from school, we cannot train other people’s children when our own are suffering.”
Speaking on the effects of the development on the state, the ASUP said “With what is happening now Kogi State will be drawn back in terms of academic pursuit, accreditation is coming later this year and it means that all our courses will not be accredited and the implication is that the certificate they are carrying is more or less like fake.”
and then