Peter Mbah, governor of Enugu State, has promised to collaborate and dialogue with the Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC), Enugu State chapter, to resolve all outstanding pensions and gratuity issues raised by the congress at the 2024 May Day celebration.
Ifeanyi Osiah, Enugu State deputy governor, who represented Governor Mbah at the Michael Opara Square venue of the event, described the state civil servants as the landlords that must be respected and work with to achieve the state government’s set goals.
He also said that the state government would go back to the drawing board and look at the issues of pensioners who have not been paid.
“We will go back and look at it. I can assure you that we have had dialogue with the NLC and we always solve our problems; so, this will not be hard to solve.
“There is no one in this country who does not know that things are hard and that the income workers receive can hardly meet their demand. Because we are not in another planet we live with our people and go to the same market, families buy from the same petrol station, the same shops, children go to the same school and we all go to the same hospital.
“When we were sworn in, it was the civil servants that showed us our desks and where the files were stacked and we can attest to the fact that we receive strong support from the NLC and TUC and the entire labour in Enugu State. Your commitments in driving government policy can never be underrated,” he said.
The governor appealed to Enugu workers to be patient as the government is doing everything it could within the means available to government to keep doing all things it could to make things better for the workers.
He called on the workers to also appreciate that for everything the state is unable to do now, was not for the fact that the government does not want to do it but for the availability of resources to meet the expanding involvements of governance.
He said it was the because of the too many areas of needs that the government is trying to create wealth, be more aggressive on the open drive for investment and why government is trying to create jobs to get things better for the people.
“Our wish and effort is that in years, days and months to come, workers in Enugu will leave the jobs they don’t like and switch to jobs that pay them better; so, that is the work we are doing for our people,” he said.
He further said that the government has embarked on the completion of International Conference Centre and also awarded a contract to review the concession of the Hotel Presidential, adding that the government is trying to revitalise the Niger Gas plant in Emene that was moribund for a number of years, among many others.
“When we talk about the smart schools, it is a revolutionary effort; what we are trying to do is to train people for today and for the future, where children would start from scratch to master science; master ethics and be able to write codes that can change the world, build next generation of workers that can challenge themselves and provide tools for the emerging economy,” he said.
