Sit-At-Home: Apprehension As Anambra Govt Slashes Workers Salaries For Failing To Work On Mondays

The Anambra State Government has followed through on its warning by deducting the salaries of workers who failed to report to duty on Mondays in compliance with the sit-at-home directive issued by separatist groups in the South-East.

The state government had in January 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.

Many Anambra civil servants on Tuesday 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 show up for 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.

He said: “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.”

When contacted, the 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.”