Incessant Sack Of Kogi Workers Is Illegal, Unacceptable 

By Senator Dino Melaye

Indiscriminate sacking of workers has now become a pastime for Yahaya Bello in Kogi State – a state that has been turned to a Civil Service State owing to the dearth of ideas to turnaround the fortunes of the state for development, productivity and sustainability.
The latest of Yahaya Bello’s unnecessary war against the civil servants in Kogi State was delivered in a garb of a report by a Staff Screening, Validation and Appeal Committee, which recommended outright dismissal and prosecution of 1,667 workers cutting across ministries, departments and agencies of the state government (MDAs) on the spurious allegation of certificate forgery.

 
On Monday, January 8 and Tuesday, January 9, a national daily carried a two-part paid advertorial containing the names of the indicted civil servants and in the words of the committee, they were “indicted for breaching Public Service Rules as a result of falsification of academic records.”

According to the advertorials sponsored by the state government in this hard times, the committee did not avail the public or Kogites of its methodology of coming to the judgment of falsification against the academic certificates of the said workers.

For the avoidance of doubt, the committee has no power to declare any worker’s academic result(s) fake except a competent court of law. This goes without saying the embarrassment caused the workers, their families and friends, particularly the elderly victims of Yahaya Bello’s charade, who had served the state for decades and rose to the enviable position of a Permanent Secretary.

This kind of inhuman government has no place in our society and her actions cannot go unchallenged. Consequently, I sympathise with the affected workers and their families while I implore them to go to court immediately to seek redress and clear their names of forgery allegation leveled against by an anti-people government of Kogi.

For the records, Yahaya Bello claims he obtained a whopping N10 billion Loan to offset salary arrears. This is a lie and it can be easily detected to be so because there was no approval to that effect by the State House of Assembly on one hand and on the other hand the outstanding 15-month salary due to the civil servants in the state as at today puts a lie to the governor’s claim.

If the immediate past Governor Idris Wada of Kogi can be spending a little over N3 billion as monthly salary of workers during his time and without sacking anybody, how come Yahaya Bello, who had sacked over 3,000 workers since inception, cannot pay staff salaries today?

It is clear to me that Yahaya Bello is only trying to reduce Kogi State’s monthly salary bill by victimising innocent civil workers in order for him to have more money for frivolities as we are witnessing in the state of recent.

Therefore, in order to put an end to Yahaya Bello’s unending lies, I challenge him to publish the names of workers paid their full salaries for the month of December 2017 and the names of banks used in the payment. I also challenge him to a public debate on the state of affairs of our dear Kogi State.

Senator Dino Melaye is a senator of the Federal Republic of Nigeria representing Kogi West Senatorial District