Akure council to sack 300 workers
From Julius Alabi, Akure
THE Akure-North Local Council of Ondo State is set to sack 300 members of its workforce due to over-staffing by the immediate past administration.
This figure is in addition to about 400 persons already sacked by the newly-elected Chairman of the council, Mr. Dele Fagorila, who spoke with The Guardian in on Monday at Iju-Ita-Ogbolu.
According to Fagorila, the remaining workers, after the retrenchment, will be better managed.
Asked why there had been such a large number of workers and the imminent retrenchment as against the Peoples Democracy Party's (PDP) policy on unemployment matters, Fagorila, however, confirmed that most of the sacked workers were never employed through the due process, the required applications, interviews, and required employment letters.
Fagorila said: Some of them were employed haphazardly without any application letters while some were even employed through proxy.
"It is very unfortunate that over 1,200 workers were given jobs without any application to that effect and without considering the financial strength of the council".
Fagorila added that 10 people were doing one person's job and in a situation like that, one could imagine the head cost in terms of salaries and other emoluments in a local council which could not even generate N60,000 as Internally Generated Revenue (IGR) in one month.
"I want to say categorically that for now, our wage bill is about N16 million monthly and we are only receiving about N13.1 million from Federal Allocation monthly", he lamented.
He said the state House of Assembly has waded into the crisis.
"You could imagine that someone who was employed in March 2002 on level 03 was promoted to level 08 two months later, that is the case of some of the affected workers", he said.
The chairman added that the council has three functional vehicles with 22 drivers and three type-writers with 23 typists, adding that it has not been able to pay workers' salaries for the past four months due to the situation in the council.
