Unpaid salaries: Delta LG staff, teachers take to begging, petty trading

WARRIM any council workers and teachers in Delta State have now resorted to begging and petty trading to feed their families, following the inability of the Governor Ifeanyi Okowa-led administration to settle the eight months salary arrears allegedly owed them. Investigations by our correspondent revealed that Governor Okowa is allegedly withholding about N2.3billion Local Government Areas July allocation for projects, a situation some of the workers have described as insensitive.
An incumbent local government chairman, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, deplored the current situation of local government workers across the state, describing their condition as pathetic and very sad.
He claimed that in some communities in the state, landlords no longer wanted to give accommodation to local government workers because many of them could no longer afford to pay their rent, feed their family or even send their children to school.
The LG boss, who is a loyalist of a former governor of the state, noted that the current situation of the workers arose because many of them collected cooperative loans that they were now servicing, despite being owed salary arrears.
He said, “When there was oil boom and the allocations to the local government were huge, the state government was holding back some of the LG funds, particularly during the tenure of the last caretaker committee chairmen. We expect the state government to go back and draw from these funds to support the LGAs now that the allocation is dwindling.
“To be candid, the governor is not being fair to the local government and the chairmen. From all indications, I think he is out to finish us politically, probably as a pay back to some of us for initially supporting Mr. Tony Obuh, who the former governor supported in the last PDP primary.
“Government is a continuum but sadly, our present governor does not see it so. That is why he refused to pay the outstanding local government workers salary arrears claiming that he is not owning workers in the state, because he inherited seven months unpaid LG salaries arrears from Governor Uduaghan.
“Even when he collected bailout from the Federal Government, what he did was to pay from when he assumed office and have consistently done that since by deliberately not talking or taking any action to offset the backlog of salaries.