Striking employees of the National Emergency Management Agency (NEMA) on Tuesday staged a protest at the agency’s headquarters in Abuja over poor conditions of service and “redundancy”.
Justin Uwazuruonye, Chairman, Association of Senior Civil Servants of Nigeria (ASCSN), NEMA Unit, who spoke on behalf of the staff, called on the Buhari Government to investigate the matter.
The workers had last Monday embarked on a nationwide indefinite strike over what they termed “maladministration, incompetence and inefficiency” of the current Director General, Engr. Mustapha Maihaja.
“You can see that we are peaceful people; what we are demanding is for NEMA to start to function again.
“In the past one year do you have any annual report? No! We have been redundant.
“Let the government ask Maihaja to produce the annual report (of the agency) for the past one year since he has been here.
“We want the government to come here and investigate our allegations and hear our side of the story.
“Our condition of service is very poor, we come to the office and sit for hours without doing anything; we don’t have tools to work.
“No papers and other writing materials for us to work with. It is killing our morale. These are our problems, beginning with not being able to do our work to failure to pay us what is due to us as workers.
“We’ll stand on them until the Federal Government hears us.
“Even the police know the truth and we have been working with them, they know that NEMA is not working, let them put a call through to our call centre now and see whether the call will go through.
“If there was to be an accident on the road now, there won’t be response from NEMA, because there is no diesel and battery in the cars to be able to move,” he said.
Also speaking, Ms. Maryam Yau, the agency’s Senior Disaster Risk Reduction Officer, said it was regrettable that Nigeria had lost its position as a country at the forefront of prompt response to disasters in Africa.
“Disaster continues to increase in this country, but people are not being helped.
“The government is doing its best, the government is giving the appropriate funding for us to actually respond to the people, but it is not happening.
“It’s frustrating; our ambulances are there parked beside the road not working; where is the effort of all of the previous administrations?
“Nigeria used to set the pace in disaster management in Africa.
“We had been doing well, we even used to go to other countries to train their people on disaster management, but now we can’t do that.
“We need to work; please, we are begging the government to come to our rescue,” he added.
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