By PAMELA EBOH, Awka

It was lamentation galore on Monday at the Jerome Udoji State Secretariat, Awka, as civil servants in Anambra State decry the cut in their February 2026 salaries for falling to show up for work on Mondays due to the sit-at-home exercise.

The State Governor, Prof Chukwuma Soludo, had in January announced a pro-rata salary payment system with deductions from salaries of civil servants that fail to come to work on Mondays which had earlier been declared a working day following the cancellation of sit-at-home.

At the State Secretariat in the state capital, some workers lamented huge deductions from their salaries that did not tally with the number of Mondays they failed to show up for work.

One of the workers who spoke on condition of anonymity said that a worker in his ministry received only N10,000 as payment for February, after deductions.

The staff, who is of the Ministry of Information, lamented that out of a total of his over N80,000 salary, he received just N3,500.

He said: “One of my colleagues said that she received her salary with N10,000 cut off from it. The cuts are irregular, but I think there were mistakes in the computing because some people who missed work only once or twice had huge deductions from their salaries.”

In his reaction, the State Commissioner for Information, Dr. Law Mefor, confirmed to journalists that the deductions were punishment for failure to come to work on Mondays.

He said: “The salary cut is a punishment for failure to come to work on Mondays. The instruction was that when you come to work on Mondays, you clock in, and, at the close of work, you clock out. That is to show that you came to work.

“But, if you came to work on Mondays but you didn’t clock in, and, didn’t clock out, it means that you didn’t come to work because there is no evidence to show that you came to work."

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