C’River: 500 sacked teachers occupy Gov’t house with mats, wrappers
Determined to fight against their sack, 500 science teachers have again barricaded the government house with mats and wrappers demanding their reinstatement into the service.
Penultimate Tuesday the workers had protested against government’s removal of their names from payroll since September.
The teachers, who carried various placards such as “reinstate our names into pay roll;” “pay us our September and October salaries,” prevented movements in and out of the governor’s office.
At the governor’s office, the protesters were seen with wrappers and mats which they spread on the ground to prevent movements in an out of the office.
Speaking on behalf of the protesting teachers, Mr Kenneth Bisong, said their removal from the payroll had caused untold hardship to families of the affected teachers.
He said: “We are protesting against the removal of our names from the government payroll in September. We were recruited in 2015 and payrolled in January 2016.
“We have been on the job until September 2019 when our names were removed from the payroll. When we did not get our September salary, we went to relevant agencies and we were told that our names have been removed from the payroll.
“The state government kept saying that they are doing staff audit to delete names of ghost workers. How can you stop the salaries of 500 science teachers for two months running and you keep talking about audit,” he lamented.”
“This is pure injustice. We brought our sleeping mats here. We are not leaving this governor’s office unless our salaries are paid and our names reinstated into the payroll,” he said.
According to him, the sacking will affect the state secondary education board negatively as classrooms are already empty with their sack.
The Special Adviser to Governor on Media and Publicity, Mr Christian Ita, had earlier said the government is carrying out a revalidation exercise to clean up the system, adding that those who were employed through due process would be reinstated.