A
journalist with the Imo State government, South-East Nigeria, has been
suspended indefinitely from her job for taking to Facebook to request
her three months unpaid salary and the wages of her co-workers.
Officials said the Facebook post was an “embarrassment” to the Imo State government.
The suspended journalist, Vivian Ottih, is a lawyer and a senior editor with the government-owned IBC Orient FM radio station.
She is the chairperson of the Nigeria Association of Women Journalists (NAWOJ), in Imo State.
Mrs
Ottih, on May 4, posted a message on Facebook, appealing to Governor
Hope Uzodinma’s media aide, Modestus Nwamkpa, to make a case to the
governor on behalf of the workers in the government-owned radio and
television stations who were yet to get their February, March, and April
salaries.
Mrs Ottih described Mr Uzodinma as a “humble” and
“performing” governor, and said the governor may not have been aware of
the travails of the workers.
She said in the post that she was personally hard-hit by the situation because she just had a baby weeks earlier.
The
journalist, in her subsequent post on May 7, thanked the Commissioner
for Information in the state, Declan Emelumba for intervening on behalf
of the unpaid workers. “God bless you, Sir,” she wrote.
On May 8, four days after, she was queried by the Imo Broadcasting Corporation.
The
query, signed by the acting director-general of the corporation,
Osuchukwu S. O, said to Mrs Ottih, “I am directed to let you know that
this your attitude caused serious embarrassment to Imo State Government
thereby ridiculing the government in the eyes of the public with the
sole aim of sabotaging the government.”
Mrs Ottih’s response to
the query was deemed unsatisfactory by the Imo government which went
ahead to suspend her indefinitely from her job.
The state government queried the journalist again on May 15, accusing her of posting the previous query on social media.
The
information commissioner, Mr Emelumba, told PREMIUM TIMES the
government was not responsible for the delay in payment of the salary.
He said the management of the Imo Broadcasting Corporation “refused” to
submit the workers’ BVN and bank account details as directed by the
government.
Mr Emelumba said the government wanted to pay
workers’ salary centrally in order to eliminate “ghost workers”, instead
of allowing the various establishments to collect money from the state
government to pay their staff as was done in the past.
A
journalist in Imo told PREMIUM TIMES that Mrs Ottih made the appeal for
the payment of the workers’ salary because she was under pressure from
fellow journalists who were also being owed by the state government.
Mr Emelumba said Mrs Ottih posted the Facebook message as an individual person, not as the NAWOJ chairperson.
“Even
if she were to issue the statement on behalf of NAWOJ she would still
be wrong because she could only speak for women journalists and not for
all the workers of the IBC,” the commissioner said.
“RATTAWU (the
radio Television Theatre and Art Workers Union of Nigeria) has the
statutory duty to do that, but they didn’t do that because they were
consulting (with government officials over the issue).”
The
commissioner said the NAWOJ chairperson could have used other channels
of communication instead of taking the issue to Facebook.
PREMIUM
TIMES asked Mr Emelumba why the government did not sanction the
corporation for delaying to send the bank details of their workers as
requested by the government.
“If we did it as you would expect, people would accuse the government of being insensitive,” he responded.
The
commissioner said he sent out a statement last week giving the
parastatals a deadline to comply with the government directive.
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