Imo Workers Protest Non-payment Of Salaries

Owerri, the Imo State Capital, was on Tuesday shaken to its very foundation following protests by workers of ministries and parastatals over non-payment of their salaries for several months now.

The aggrieved workers who appeared in black attires with placards barricaded all major roads within the city and later proceeded to the State House of Assembly where they vehemently kicked against the passage of the obnoxious law legalizing and privatizing all parastatals in the state.

Some of the inscriptions read: “stop this greed and pay us our salaries”; stop this impunity, pay local government medical and health workers”; “Owelle, pay retired primary school teachers their outstanding gratuities from 1998 to date”; “Our children are dying of hunger”; “We say No to Imo State House of Assembly passing a bill on privatizing state parastatals”.

The Speaker of the House, Rt. Hon. Acho Ihim, who managed to address the workers, however, dismissed the allegation as baseless.

Chanting solidarity songs, with invectives against the government for alleged insensitivity to their predicament, the protesting workers later converged at the “Freedom Square, adjacent the popular Orlu Road/Warehouse Junction, where the chairman of the NLC, Comrade Austine Chilakpu, and his Trade Union Congress (TUC) counterpart, Paul Akalazu, jointly addressed them.

The duo who decreed that no weapon fashioned against the workers would prosper wondered how workers in the state could survive amidst the nation’s economic downturn without salaries, lamenting that the economy of the state had been grounded as a result of non-payment of their salaries.

The trade unionists who gave a breakdown of the unpaid salary arrears owed workers advised them to remain calm and not to be intimidated by the antics of the State Head of Service (HOS), Calistus Ekenze, who, according to them, had compiled a list of workers absent from their duty posts for necessary action.   

However, reacting to the protest, the Chief Press Secretary to the Governor, Mr. Sam Onwuemeodo, said leaders of organised labour in the state should be patriotic and avoid being tools in the hands of some elements.