14th December, 2013
No fewer than 900 former staff of the defunct Nigeria Airways have died after they waited fruitlessly for the payment of the severance wages and pension.
The National vice chairman, Nigerian Union of Pensioners, Airways Branch, Alhaji Mohammed Adamu made the disclosure in Kano today, during a protest by surviving former employees of the airline.
The ex-staff staged a peaceful protest over non-payment of their entitlements for 20 years.
The protesters, who thronged their former office on Bank Road in Kano at about 2p.m., carried placards with inscriptions as: “pay us our entitlements’’, “we are dying.’’
Adamu said the protest was informed by the failure of the Government to pay their entitlements.
“As I am talking to you now, many of us cannot feed our families while our children have been sent home from schools due to our inability to pay their fees.
“If government liquidates an airline, it has to pay 25 years entitlement to all the disengaged workers; it is the law of the International Air Transport Association (IATA).
“But in our own case, we were only paid five years of the entitlement while our colleagues abroad have since been paid’’, Adamu said.
He said most of them had served the nation for many years but the payment of the entitlement had now become a problem despite earlier promises by the Ministry of Aviation.
He, therefore, called on President Goodluck Jonathan to intervene in the matter.
“When we took the matter to court, we were asked to withdraw the case with the hope that the money would be paid’’, he added.