Anambra State government has made good its threat to slash salaries of workers who failed to show up for work on Mondays, that were earlier declared sit at home days by separatist elements.

The state government had in January announced that it would begin a pro-rata payment system, with deductions from salaries of civil servants who failed to come to work on Mondays. The governor also used the opportunity to announce an end to sit at home protests.

Meanwhile, on Monday it was a tale of woes among the state civil servants as they lamented huge deductions from their February salaries, as they received bank alerts for their wages.

At Jerome Udoji State Secretariat, Awka, 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 pleaded to speak under anonymity said a worker in his ministry only received N100 as payment for February, after deductions.

The staff member from 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.”

When contacted, the state Commissioner for Information, Dr. Law Mefor, confirmed 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,” Mefor said. (BusinessDay, but headline reworked)