Some secondary school teachers, recruited in September 2018 under the previous Ayodele Fayose-led Ekiti State Government, on Thursday stormed the streets, protesting against alleged isolation from staff payroll and non-payment of seven months salary arrears.
The News Agency of Nigeria reports that the protesters urged Governor Kayode Fayemi to intervene and end their plights.
The teachers, who converged on Ikere Ekiti, headquarters of Ikere Local Government Area of the state, said several efforts to get the attention of the government had been unsuccessful.
According to them, no concrete step has been taken to either pay them or dialogue with them.
Bayo Omoyeni, who spoke on their behalf, said that several letters were written to the governor, his wife, the deputy governor and some traditional rulers, urging them to intervene and end the hardship being experienced by the teachers, but all to no avail.
Omoyeni said: “These efforts have not yielded any desired result because we have not received any communication from them.
“We want the government to immediately react to our demand and such reaction must be done between now and Monday when we are resuming for third term.
“We are calling on the governor to immediately speak with us.
“How can the governor set up a panel where none of us was invited to come and defend our case?
“The news all over the state is that we are politicians, that we are partisan, but we are not members of any political party.
“We are youths of Ekiti State seeking employment and were given regular employment by the previous administration. We assume that government is a continuum.
“We went through interviews, and letters of employment were given to us. Subsequently, we were deployed to various schools in the state to work.”
Omoyeni also alleged that there had never been any correspondence between the embattled teachers and the present government.
He, however, said they fully understood that the government could owe them salaries, but the Fayemi-led government should give them audience.
According to him, the teachers cannot resume the third term without knowing what is going to happen to the two terms already spent.
He said: “The governor should save us from this psychological trauma by meeting with our representatives. Our people are having problems with their landlords in their areas of postings.
“The information at our disposal is that our counterparts that were employed the same time, who are in other vocations, have been attended to.
“They have been doing their biometric screening.
“As we speak, nobody has addressed us on the issue of biometric screening that will lead to our own payment.
“Our direct employer, the Teaching Service Commission, has been telling us that it does not know whether we will be employed and this is not acceptable to us.”
Reacting to the demands of the teachers, the state Commissioner for Education, Foluso Daramola, said that government was concerned by the plight of this category of teachers.
He said that the committee set up to look into the circumstances of their employment had almost concluded its work.
Daramola said: “The government is concerned about their plight in the sense that they are indigenes of Ekiti State.
“Ordinarily, if this government does not have human face, such a last minute employment would have been ignored.
“However, the state governor insists that, ‘these people are my people.’ So, everything must be done on its own merit. That is why government sets up a high powered committee headed by the Deputy Governor to look into their matter.”
The Commissioner said the committee’s work was at advanced stage and it will advise the government as appropriate on the way forward.
He said: “The government cannot just inherit them without looking into how they were employed in the first place.
“This government is passionate about every citizen and it has come to restore the values that we lost in the past.
“That is why the governor is interested in how they are employed before knowing what to do. They should be hopeful.”
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