C’River requires over 20,000 workforces for productivity — NLC

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C’River requires over 20,000 workforces for productivity — NLC

The Chairman of the Nigeria Labour Congress, NLC, in Cross River state, Com. Gregory Olayi has revealed that the state requires at least 20,000 persons in its workforce to remain efficient and productive in delivering quality service to the people.

Com. Olayi made the revelation on Wednesday while briefing journalists at the NUT Secretariat in Calabar.

The NLC Chairman said since the creation of Akwa Ibom state till now which is now 36 years a lot of civil servants are retiring based on service years and this started depleting the workforce in 2022.

He added that it has become expedient that more people were employed in the civil service to make the workforce productive and efficient.

His words:” I want to make it clear that the retirement age approval for teachers is not the governor Ayade’s initiative, but an act of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, the governor only approved( domiciled) it in the state.

“We are urging the government to implement the promotion of those who have been promoted since eight years ago.

“We have: also urged the government to employ more teachers, there are schools with just three teachers especially primary schools, many of them need at least 30 teachers, and a lot of our workers are retiring, especially teachers.

, More than 90 per cent started leaving in 2022 and it will be more this 2023 so we need at least 10,000 teachers for now or even more.

“The civil service as a whole needs up to 20,000 employees to be more efficient and productive because If you calculate from when Akwa Ibom was created from Cross River in 1987, it’s 36 years, a lot of people moved then to Akwa Ibom, and now more than 80 Percent of the workforce have worked up to 35 years.

“We are in dire need of workers a lot started exiting the service since 2022 / 2023, the engine room which is the workforce needs more hands, young people that can also learn from the old people with years if experience who are now leaving the service and this is one of the ways that the people can benefit from the dividend of democracy,” he said.

Speaking further he congratulated the governor-elect, Sen. Bassey Otu while urging him to continue with only projects of the current governor that are beneficial and people-oriented.

Olayi said:” I want to urge the governor-elect to sustain the good policies of the previous administration and discard the ones not favourable to the people.

“There are projects that he would complete that will be of immense benefit to the people, he should not continue with the ones that are not beneficial to the people.

“The governor-elect has a lot of tasks at hand, the voting pattern during shows that the people have so much confidence in him, but he has a lot of work to do because there are so many expectations from the people.

“We have a lot of agitations and demands on the ground that has not been met, but he has a lot of problems to solve like in the labour axis, generally the workers in the state need implementation of promotion, there are people who have been waiting for 8 years to be promoted, there other issues, we hope he will handle them in due course,” Olayi said.