AN OPEN LETTER TO GOVERNOR YAHAYA ADOZA BELLO
Your Excellency,
Governor Yahaya Adoza Bello,
The Executive Governor, Kogi State, Lokoja.
Dear Sir,
Maltreatment of Kogi Scholars on Overseas Study Leaves by the Pay Parade Committee
With much respect, honour and humility, I write to present to you the dehumanization and unfair treatment of lecturers of the state-owned tertiary institutions on overseas study leaves by the Kogi State Pay Parade Committee. This category of staffers are pursuing various research programmes in highly ranked overseas universities to enhance their service delivery to the credit of the state and the nation at large.
Your Excellency Sir, you recently approved a table payment strategy to workers for checkmating leakages in the ever-rising wage bill of the state despite the committed policy of your government to restore sanity to the system. It is in line with this action that I want to bring to your notice the predicaments and maltreatments faced by the overseas scholars that could not make it home for the table payment exercise.
The managements of the various tertiary institutions made submissions on behalf of their overseas scholars and presented same to the committee. Our admission letters, study leave letters and other vital documents and information were presented to the committee to prove the legitimacy of our absence. Disappointedly, the cheques of these lecturers have been returned to government and nothing had been done till date.
Recently, one month salary was paid across board and this category of suffering but highly ambitious lecturers were also excluded. As I write this letter, our names are no longer in the Kogi State government payroll. Though we heard that over four hundred ghost workers were detected in the table payment exercise, but hardly do we believe that we can be declared ghosts.
Several messages to the published WhatsApp number of the committee (09051524407) and some of your aides on this matter were neither replied nor responded to. I personally reached out to the Council Chairman of the Polytechnic, Prof. Sam Egwu but he was equally helpless. We have undoubted and total certainty that the matter is not known to you but all efforts to reach you proved abortive. Thus, the reason for reaching you through this medium.
Your Excellency Sir, permit me to highlight some reasons the scholars could not make it home. Firstly, travelling must be well planned ahead of time by the scholars and their supervisors. Telling our supervisors that we are travelling for table payment looks suspicious because they are in custody of our study leave letters. It also brings down our country before them since such a monumental corruption that necessitated the table payment do not exist in many of our countries of residence.
Secondly, many science and engineering scholars are on laboratory and field works that are programmed and assessed on time basis. They cannot leave this main purpose of their studies unattended even for just an hour in some cases.
Thirdly, a good number of these scholars reside in far away countries with flight distance of over 15,000km and need over Six Hundred Thousand Naira (₦600,000.00) for the cheapest return flight ticket to make it home. No direct flights in some cases and two or more flights must be taken as a matter of necessity.
Sadly, these lecturers were not sponsored by the state government but now been denied of their rights. If the state cannot help our various challenges, it is good to leave us with them without adding more burden that are obviously unbearable. We hope to return as better human assets to the state and not a dehumanized and traumatized being. A hungry man is an angry man.
Your Excellency Sir, we have the absolute confidence that you will not just order for the return of our cheques but also ensure that our names are restored back to government payroll and the last payment equally credited to our accounts. We shall present ourselves for biometric capturing on return to the country.
Your urgent and favourable intervention is highly anticipated.
Thank you and God bless.
Engr. Shehu S. A. (MNSE, MNMGS, MNSME)
Overseas PhD Student; and Lecturer, Kogi State Polytechnic, Lokoja
