An elder statesman and chieftain of the All Progressives Congress (APC) in Abia State, Chief Charles Ogbonnaya, has charged Governor Alex Otti to recall the more than 2,000 workers he sacked on assumption of office before hunger wipes them and their families out.
He said it was both inhuman and insensitive for Otti to have abandoned the case of those sacked workers for more than two years, not bothering about their financial destitution and the attendant trauma.
Speaking to journalists at his home in Umuahia, Ogbonnaya, who is the Evulogu Ibeku, alleged that the governor was now using starvation as a political weapon to subdue Abia people ahead of the 2027 elections.
“Christmas is coming again, and these sacked workers are once more desolate because of Alex Otti’s refusal to recall them to a job that they got through due process. I mean, it was a governor like himself who gave approval for their employment. Why do you now want to use politics and starvation to bring them to their knees?” Ogbonnaya fumed.
He noted that since those workers were sacked, Alex Otti has gone ahead to employ other workers whose number exceeded the dismissed ones and wondered if it was not a sheer act of victimisation by the governor.
According to him, “It appears that the only crime the sacked workers committed is that they were employed by a PDP administration. If not, how come Otti is still employing every day without recourse to the fate of those earlier disengaged?”
“Unfortunately, these are the same people whom he will very soon revert to for votes after such a dehumanising treatment,” he declared.
Ogbonnaya, who is a two-time former commissioner in the state, lamented that the sacked workers are not the only victims of Otti’s insensitivity, as permanent secretaries who were forcefully retired by him have neither been paid their gratuities nor their pensions.
He also disclosed that retired staff of the Broadcasting Corporation of Abia State are suffering because the governor has refused to release their 11-month pension arrears.
The APC chieftain regretted that many families in Abia State were faced with a bleak Christmas as a result of Otti’s deliberate attempt to subjugate the people of Abia State through a targeted starvation policy.
Chief Ogbonnaya wondered why organised labour and civil society organisations have kept quiet in the face of this “naked tyranny.”
“The retired permanent secretaries have grown weary complaining every month, same as the BCA staff, but these sacked workers have no one to speak for them at all,” he lamented.
He charged Otti to desist from inflicting pain on those families and recall the sacked workers without further delay.
