Some former employees of Nigeria Airways in Kano on Saturday staged a peaceful protest over non-payment of their entitlements for 20 years.
The
protesters, who thronged their former office on Bank Road in Kano at about
2p.m., carried placards with inscriptions as: “pay us our entitlements’’, “we
are dying.’’
The
National Vice Chairman, Nigerian Union of Pensioners, Airways Branch, Alhaji
Mohammed Adamu, said the protest was informed by the failure of the Government
to pay their entitlements.
According
to him, over 900 of their members have so died of frustration while a number of
them are still battling with one sickness or the other at home.
“As
I am talking to you now, many of us cannot feed our families while our children
have been sent home from schools due to our inability to pay their fees.
“If
government liquidates an airline, it has to pay 25 years entitlement to all the
disengaged workers; it is the law of the International Air Transport
Association (IATA).
“But
in our own case, we were only paid five years of the entitlement while our
colleagues abroad have since been paid’’, Adamu said.
He
said most of them had served the nation for many years but the payment of the
entitlement had now become a problem despite earlier promises by the Ministry
of Aviation.
He,
therefore, called on President Goodluck Jonathan to intervene in the matter.
“When
we took the matter to court, we were asked to withdraw the case with the hope
that the money would be paid’’, he added.
Source:
NAN
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