Labour Kicks As Kano Cuts Salaries

Civil servants in Kano State said Wednesday that they had been left confused following unexplained slashes in their November and December salaries.

Some civil servants said they were left with less than the old minimum wage of N18, 000. Officials of the state government denied reverting to the old minimum wage, insisting that there were only deductions because of the prevailing recession in the country occasioned by COVID-19.

The federal government had in 2020 increased the minimum wage to N30, 000 and some states followed suit by adopting the increment based on the grade level of their workers.

A cross-section of civil servants in Kano described the “slash” as unfair, saying the Governor Abdullahi Umar Ganduje-led administration shouldn’t have deducted money from their November and December salaries at a period when it released N2.3 billion for the conduct of local government elections scheduled for January 16.

This is even as many of them have continued to raise questions on what the government is doing with the several monies it is getting from different sources including federal allocation, internally generated revenue and grants from donor agencies.

Most recently, the Niger State Government declared that it could no longer pay 100 per cent salary while Gombe State stopped the payment of the N30,000 minimum wage since March 2020, both citing the effect of the coronavirus pandemic on the nation’s economy.