Staff of Public Complaints Commission Begins Strike

Onyebuchi Ezigbo in Abuja

Staff of the Public Complaints Commission, PCC, on Tuesday embarked on a massive protest against the 50% slash in their salaries, threatening that unless the situation was reversed they would not return to work.

Ironically, , PCC, whose mandate is to investigate all manner of injustices against individuals in the country, now finds itself immersed in acts of purported injustice to its staff.

The protesters who sealed the organization’s headquarters in the Maitama District of Abuja lamented that since January 2016, their salaries have been paid on percentages.

Some of them carried placards with inscriptions saying, “Take us back to presidency”; “We protest patent of half salary”.

In a statement jointly signed by the Chairman of the Joint Union of Civil Servants in the commission, Comrade Ogunyando Oladipo Joshua and his deputy, Dorcas Tabitha John, the protesting staff noted that “the grim situation began with the payment of workers’ salaries on percentages.

“When the management of the commission was confronted to explain the unsolicited fragmented salaries, it was made known that the Ministry of Budget and National Planning, the Ministry of Finance and the National Assembly against every known rationale and logic insensitively handed the Commission N2 billion only as its 2016 budgetary allocation, signifying a far-reaching departure from the N4 billion approved for the Commission in the 2015 fiscal year.”