Secondary school teachers recruited in September 2018 by the former governor, Ayodele Fayose, administration yesterday protested non-payment of seven months salaries they alleged the state government is owing them.
The teachers appealed to Gov Kayode Fayemi to pay the salaries and end their “plight”.
The teachers, who trooped out in their hundreds at Ikere-Ekiti, lamented that their efforts to get the attention of the government had fallen on deaf ears since no concrete step had been taken to either pay or engage them in dialogue.
One of the protesters, Mr Bayo Omoyeni, told reporters, on behalf of his colleagues, that they had written letters to Fayemi, his wife, the deputy governor and some traditional rulers urging them to intervene and end the “untold hardship being experienced by the teachers.”
Omoyeni said, “We want the government to immediately react to our demand and such reaction must be done between now and Monday when we will be resuming for the 3rd term.
“We are using this medium to tell Mr Governor to immediately speak with us. How can the governor set up a panel where none of us was invited to defend our case?
“The news all over the state is that we are politicians, that we are partisan. Now, we want to use this medium to tell him that we are not members of any political party. We are youths of Ekiti State seeking employment and were given employment by the previous administration.
“We went through interviews and letters of employment were given to us. We were deployed to various schools in the state to work. Up till today, there has been no correspondence with us by the present government. The government could owe us salaries but we demand that the governor speak with us.
“We can’t resume the third term without knowing what is going to happen to the two terms already spent. The governor should save us from psychological trauma by meeting with our representatives. Our people are having problems with their landlords in their areas of postings.
“The information at our disposal is that our counterparts that were employed the same time who are in other vocations had been attended to. We want to see that as discrimination against this crop of teachers. As we speak, nobody has addressed us on the issue of biometric screening that will lead to payment.”
But the Commissioner for Education, Mr Foluso Daramola, responded that government was concerned about the plight of the teachers, saying that the committee set up to look into the circumstances of their employment had almost concluded its work.
