Where Is Our Money?
By Michael Shaibu
Nigeria Airways was liquidated in the first half of the first decade in 21st century. In civilized climes, ex-staff of liquidated airlines get 25 years of their annual dues as severance payments.
Not so with the ex-staff of Nigeria Airways! Since the days of president Obasanjo who carried out the liquidation, it has been one woe after the other for us in the hands of either the government, its agencies, and/or our own representatives, our union.
Payments in whatever guise have been through dreary, ridiculously painful, and needlessly cumbersome processes. In 2009, we filled and signed an undertaking to forfeit 1% of our entitlements to the law firm that accepted to represent us.
By 2018, we found that our own union, without consulting us to secure our consent at all, had hiked that undertaking to 4%. Nobody asked any questions and no explanations were offered.
And that was what likely emboldened them in their impunity. To bolster their power over us, they merged the several unions into a super one they called AUGA, under a chairman that rules like a king.
The first AUGA chairman, Lukmon Animashaun favoured us (his subjects) with semi regular updates, which were fabrications concocted in line with what he believed we would like to hear. The current chairman, Capt Alfa feels too big to even give any updates at all.
But every once in a blue moon, he and his lieutenants carefully planted one lie or the other in the grapevine to keep us from publicly agitating. And till date, they have fed us with so many of such lies as to the actual situation concerning our payment.
For instance, on the 16th of March, Capt Alfa's lieutenants, Sam Nzene and Ibrahim Wasaini, met with us and told us that 15 billion naira was ready and asked if we wanted that paid out to us immediately. We all agreed. Yet, it never happened.
Then in the third week of May, we got a briefing that the union had totally accomplished everything necessary and we were to expect payment alerts before the inauguration of May 29. And from our secure private info network, Intel reached us that CBN truly had been given all the computations and the go to disburse the money to us.
Intriguingly the inauguration has come and gone and we have not got the alerts. And the union has begun to churn out another barrage of lies!
Meanwhile, many of our colleagues, while waiting for these payments, are bedridden or homeless, while many others have died of treatable ailments as a result of poverty.
So we ask our union: where is our money? You told us that President Buhari promised to pay us before leaving office. You told us 15 billion naira was ready. Then you told us that the president had also signed the approval for more money.
Now President Buhari has left office and we are yet to get alerts. Where is our money? We want answers fast.
They do not know that we have a sound/secure network of sources where we get our Intel from. The same source through which we got Intel that CBN had got the go to disburse our money has also reliably informed us that CBN has already disbursed our money to our various banks on Friday the 26th.
But before that exercise, our source told us that, Capt Alfa and his lieutenants were busy in Abuja, going from one bank HQs to the other. We cannot say for sure why they did this. But, Nigeria being a country where nearly every form of fraud is possible, there can only be one possible reason for this: to cut dirty deals with our money!
In this case, the banks are to hold our monies coming into their banks till they (the union) give the order to send out alerts to us. The target is for the money to yield interest. How heartless!
We are not bankers. So we do not know how this works. But our sources have never lied to us. All we ask is: where is our money? We demand for immediate answers!
All we want is our money which has been released by the government. We are not interested in making trouble. But without getting the necessary answers, we will be left with no option than to invite the relevant bodies to help us delve into the matter to unearth the truth.
Michael Shaibu is a Writer.
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