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.
