The leadership of the Joint National Public Service Negotiating Council has threatened to picket Nigeria’s Office of the Accountant General of the Federation over salary cuts and payments in the months of January and February 2025.
This comes as the Council disagreed with OAGF’s claim that there is no shortfall in payment of salaries for the two months under review.
The National Secretary of JNPSNC, Olowoyo Gbenga, disclosed this in a statement on Monday.
His statement comes as the OAGF on March 7 clarified that the Federal Government has no salary payment shortfalls in January and February.
However, JNPSNC, a council made up of all federal servants, said the claims by the office of the Accountant General of the Federation were far from the truth.
According to him, the Nigerian government is owing federal public servants “the six (6) months outstanding wage award comprising February 2024 – July, 2024, which will cease for payment as a result of the agreement reached, which Alia stated that “payment of wage award will stop as soon as minimum wage payment commences” and minimum wage payments were expected tocommence in the month of August 2024; the wage award payment is in line with a circular issued by the National Salaries, Wages, and Income Commission vide SWC.04/T/33 dated 19th October, 2023.
“The national leadership of JNPSNC’s diligent study of monthly salary pay slips issued to a cross-section of federal workers in the months under reference indicated that there was nowhere it was stated that salary arrears arising from minimum wage was unambiguously inserted.”
“The claim that arrears of 25% and 35% is very ambiguous and tantamount to the figment imagination of the Office of the Accountant General of the Federation because there is an extant circular to the effect of this payment issued by the Office of the National Salaries, Income, and Wages Commission,” JNPSNC explained.
The council warned that to avert shutdown, March salary should be paid in full.
“It is expedient to state that the payment of Peculiar Allowance, which was supposed to be 40 percent of workers’ salaries were surreptitiously short-changed by the Office of the Accountant General of the Federation with abysmal payment, which does not commensurate with the actual percentage stipulated in the federal government circular issued during the former administration under former President Mohamadu Buhari.
“On the strength of the aforesaid, the office of the Accountant General of the Federation should, as a matter of urgency, do a thorough assessment of his claims and correct the anomalies and pay correct salaries for federal workers in the month of March 2025 alongside arrears of the mutilated salaries experienced by workers in the months of January and February 2025.
“Without mincing words, failure on the part of the Office of the Accountant General of the Federation to do the needful by paying normal salaries in the month of March 2025 (and arrears of short payments that characterised the months of January and February 2025 salaries: workers will not hesitate to picket the Office of the Accountant General of the Federation in order to correct the unwarranted and unjustifiable salary cut,” the statement reads.