By Ebube Bruno | Hit 95.9 FM, Calabar
Tuesday, 10 November 2026
Some affected local government workers in Cross River State say they have not started receiving their salaries, despite the State Government’s announcement on 2nd October 2026 that Governor Bassey Otu had approved the restoration of 3,000 local government workers to the state payroll.
The workers made the complaint on Tuesday after a protest at the Federal Secretariat, Calabar.
Speaking to journalists after the protest, Julius Uchi, who led the group, said the workers have protested several times over the matter.
According to him, each protest by the workers had drawn a fresh reaction from the government, and each action by the government had in turn led to another protest.
He explained that after their first protest, a new Local Government Commission was set up. After they protested again, a panel of inquiry was set up to investigate the matter. They protested yet again, before a publication by the State Government on social media stated that the whole recruitment process had been nullified.
Uchi said the present protest is because, despite the announcement that the Governor had met with organised labour on 2nd October and decided to reinstate everybody, they are yet to be payrolled more than a month after.
“When he stated that, we believed we were the people and salaries have been paid. We’ve not received anything, so that is why we came out again,” Uchi said.
“We Were Duly Employed”
The workers rejected claims that they were recruited illegally, insisting that they duly followed the recruitment process from application to deployment.
“We were employed, screened, our documents checked, sent to the local government council where we were checked again, screened, sent back to the commission. The commission now checked again and sent us to the Auditor-General, where image capturing was done, then we were deployed to start work for the State Government,” Uchi said.
He questioned the claim of illegal employment, asking if the official documents they attended to, the revenue generated and the cases handled by those in primary health centres were also illegal.
“We are duly employed and the government have been enjoying our services. We want our pay,” he said.
Public Complaints Commission Reacts
In reaction, the Cross River State Commissioner of the Public Complaints Commission, Owa Owuna, said the Commission would take up their complaints with the Head of Service of the State and the Chairman of the Local Government Commission.
“We will write to the Head of Service and the Local Government Commission Chairman to find out what is the position of the plight of these [workers], especially when they say amongst them some were taken to be employed and some were abandoned. We need to know the criteria they adopted for that purpose,” he said.
He added that if any worker was shortchanged, the government must make amends, noting that employing a person and jettisoning the employment midway is against the rules.
“You can’t employ somebody and jettison the employment midway, it is criminal, it is against the rules. So we will urge the institutions concerned to follow the rules to avoid litigation,” he said.
