Over 100 railway construction workers to be sacked

Over one hundred workers involved in the on-going reconstruction of railway lines linking Port-Harcourt to Makurdi are to be sacked by the company handling the project - ESER West Africa Ltd. Their offence? They absconded from their duty posts!

Making the disclosure to newsmen in Enugu on Thursday, the company’s legal adviser, Henry Okoro, said the workers disappeared from the project sites more than one week ago without giving any strike notice.

His words:

“As I talk to you, we can’t say that the workers are on strike because there was no notice to that effect. The law provides for a mandatory 14 days notice, but in this case, there was no such thing.

“The only thing we saw was that the leader of the workers’ union mobilized other persons and they made the workers to abscond from their duty posts.

“Ever since this happened, several invitations have been sent to them so that we can have a dialogue, but they refused to show up. Even the DPO of Railway Police Division, and the Area Commander have invited them for dialogue, but they have remained inaccessible”.

Okoro, said the company would have to recruit new workers to meet up with the deadline in line with contract terms. He said:

 “As a good corporate body, we owe the public some explanation to avoid rumour mongering, because there have been speculations; so we want to set the records straight.

“We cannot remain inactive forever; we have to replace the workers who absconded from duty because we don’t know where they are and the reason why they absconded.

“The only thing we understand from this is that few persons, out of their selfish reasons, convinced the workers to abandon their duty posts”.