▪︎Anticipatory approvals: Fire on the mountain as CNA summons emergency Tender Board’s meeting
These are not the best of times for the Clerk to the National Assembly, CNA, Architect Amos Ojo, as he is taking on pressure from different flanks simultaneously from workers of the National Assembly over whom he superintends.
His last-ditch effort to get the National Assembly workers to backpedal on their planned strike beginning from afternoon of Tuesday, April 13, 2021, has fallen through.
He is also running helter-skelter to cover up his tracks by summoning an emergency meeting of the management’s Tenders Board for Monday afternoon to ratify all his anticipatory approvals since he stepped in the saddle in July 2020.
In the first instance, the Parliamentary Staff Association of Nigeria (PASAN), which is the workers’ union, rose from a well-attended congress on Monday morning in one of the conference rooms on the premises of the National Assembly Complex with a resolution to proceed with the strike.
Management’s proposal of a half payment of the workers’ outstanding N3 billion arrears of minimum wage and N10 billion of entitlements, encapsulated in their conditions of service, could not sway the workers and their leadership from giving effect to their threat to shut down legislative and administrative activities indefinitely.
Management had proposed to pay hazard allowance and minimum wage but without the arrears for now, which the workers rejected.
At the meeting, workers insisted on full payment and implementation of their welfare package and improvement in their conditions of service even as they kicked and rejected outright the management’s bait of a half payment.
The workers, at the meeting, gave management between today and 12 noon tomorrow to make a commitment even as staff members insisted that until they received credit alerts indicating full payment of their outstanding minimum wage arrears and other entitlements, they would not come to work or withdraw their services.
To mobilise payment of N13 billion between now and tomorrow afternoon appears an impossible hurdle to surmount for the CNA, and this much, as learnt, he has already told the workers’ union. He had told them repeatedly that the management did not have money to meet the demands in one fell swoop.
The venue of the Monday meeting was stretched to its limits due to the workers’ massive attendance. PASAN had fully mobilized workers to prepare them for the next action. A worker said it was going to be a fight-to-the-finish outing.
The CNA is said to be worried about the implications of the workers’ strike for legislative and administrative businesses.
His anxiety, according to a source close to his office, has also heightened against the backdrop of warnings handed down to him when he stepped in the saddle by the Senate President, Ahmad Lawan, that as Chairman of the National Assembly, he would not condone any unrest by staff members of the National Assembly.
In another development on Monday afternoon, the CNA summoned an emergency management’s Tenders Board meeting in a desperate move to cure the mischief of anticipatory approvals that he had been engaged in since July 2020 when he was appointed into the office in an acting capacity.
The move followed a report by this newspaper adverting public attention to the infraction of the Fiscal Responsibility Act and extant Financial Regulations which do not provide for anticipatory approvals.
It was learnt that the purpose of the emergency meeting was to get the Tenders’ Board to quickly cure the mischief by giving retrospective approvals to all the contracts awarded and expenditures he caused the management on his watch as CNA to make from July 2020 till date.
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