Anambra State Government has made good its threat to slash salaries of workers who failed to show up for work on Mondays due to the sit-at-home ordered by the proscribed Indigenous People of Biafra in the South-East states.
In January, the state government had announced that it would begin a pro-rata payment system, with deductions from salaries of civil servants who failed to come to work on Mondays.
On Tuesday, many Anambra civil servants lamented huge deductions from their February salaries after they received bank alerts of their wages.
At Jerome Udoji State Secretariat in Awka, the state capital, some workers lamented that the deductions did not tally with the number of Mondays they failed to come to work.
One of the workers, who pleaded anonymity, said a colleague in his office only received N100 as payment for February, after deductions.
The worker, who is a staff of the Ministry of Information, lamented that out of his over N80,000 salary, he received just N3,500.
According to him, “One of my colleagues said that she received her salary with N10,000 cut off from it. The cuts are irregular, but I think there were mistakes in the computing because some people who missed work only once or twice had huge deductions from their salaries.”
Commissioner for Information, Dr. Law Mefor, confirmed to journalists that the deductions were punishment for failure to come to work on Mondays.
He said, “The salary cut is a punishment for failure to come to work on Mondays. The instruction was that when you come to work on Mondays, you clock in, and, at the close of work, you clock out. That is to show that you came to work.
“But, if you came to work on Mondays but you didn’t clock in, and, didn’t clock out, it means that you didn’t come to work because there is no evidence to show that you came to work.”
