Nasarawa govt withholds LG workers’ pay

Posted by admin Nasarawa, State News Thursday, October 6th, 2011

Local governments in Nasarawa State are yet to get their August and September salaries as the state government refused to allow local government’s directors of personnel managements to implement the N18,000 minimum wage to that level of government.

Daily Sun investigations revealed that although Governor Umar Tanko Al-makura has commenced the payments of N18,000 minimum wage to state workers, but that gesture was yet to be extended to the local government workers in the state most of the local government workers in the state have attributed the delay in the payments of their salaries to lack of commitment on the part of the state government and the Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC) in the state to the welfare of local government staff. “We embarked on this minimum wage struggle together but to our greatest surprise, the state workers got their own, but in our own case, they said we are not going to get it, is this fair?” Said one of the aggrieved workers in one of the local government areas of the state.

Some local government workers were of the view that they were not paid the N18,000 minimum wage with their colleagues at the state level because of the fact that their Directors of Personnel Management (DPMs) have inflated the figures of their salaries and that Governor Al-Makura was not happy with the new development and was left with no other option than to delay the payments pending when the accurate figures of local government’s staffers are known before the commencement of the full payment of N18,000 minimum wage to the local government workers in the state.

But on their parts, PDP members in the state were of the view that the state Governor Umar Tanko Al-Makura might have tampered with the local government funds that was why he could not pay local government staff in the state in the past two months. But in a sharp reaction, a CPC chieftain in the state, Umar Adamu said, “Governor Al-Makura is a man of honour and integrity, and there is no way we would tamper with local government’s fund like the previous governments in the state.”

-Sunwp_posts