Someone tells you he has appointed you into Government office as Commissioner or SA or PA, and waits until the end of the administration, then invites you to come and do documentation to be given your appointment letters? For a new job or for the job you have finished doing? (that’s if you did any job by the way).
You all in your thousands thronged the office of the Secretary to the State Government SSG, Tina Agbor Esq. You, SSAs and SAs and PAs to His Excellency, didn’t even have seats to perch your tired bums and legs from long journeys to Calabar. The crowd had to stand by the hallway. Remember when Deputy Governor Ivara Esu, arrived for work and was climbing the stairs? You were driven from the hallway to make way for him and how many of you stretched your necks to catch a glimpse of him. Even when the SSG herself arrived shortly after the Deputy Governor, you were still cramped into one side of the hallway to make way for her to pass too.
Two rooms in her office were designated for the exercise. Eight officials are seated on two tables in the outer room who take your name, title of appointment, telephone number, and signature. Five appointees were allowed in per time. If any appointee forgot to bring along a printout of the press release where their names were mentioned as appointees, any of the officials will quickly make a copy for you after paying N1,000.
After taking those initial details, you then proceed to the second room where a lady and a man do certificate verification. In this office, all appointees who came for the exercise were extorted of N1,000 each, by the two officials. Any of them will ask you for the money, collect it, pull out the drawers under their tables and deposit the money inside and close the drawer. They are all staff working in the office of the SSG.
That wasn’t all. You have to get three months payslips from the office of the Accountant General of the State. There was a very long queue in that office. Not just to collect the pay slips, but to also pay N200 for each payslip for every month totaling N600 for the three. If you wanted express service, there was a second toll door where officials were collecting N1,000 for fast track. They were all staff working in the office of the Accountant General.
After all the rigmarole. After all the extortion and vilification, the appointment letters were still not given to you. You were told you will be reached on the phone. What exactly did you go to do in Calabar that couldn’t have been done online? It could only have been your biometrics, which was not taken. Can’t you see that you are just one unprintable name?
How do you feel as an adult?
Now many of you are heartbroken because you have now found out through your payslips, the ridiculous deductions that are removed from what is supposed to be your pay, and the deserving allowances that you are not given. How you have been scammed and how our State has been fleeced.
But have you not sincerely made yourselves willing conduits in the heist that has taken place in our State in the last eight years?
Just think am, you sef!!!!!
Yours sincerely,
Citizen Agba Jalingo is the Publisher of CrossRiverWatch and a rights activist, a Cross Riverian, and writes from Lagos.
NB: Opinions expressed in this article are strictly attributable to the author, Agba Jalingo, and do not represent the opinion of CrossRiverWatch or any other organization the author works for/with.