By DADA AYOKHAI
Local Government workers across Edo State will most likely have a bleak Sallah celebration owing to the non-payment of their salary by the state government.
When our reporter visited some of the local government area offices, he saw the workers gathered in a group of threes and fours and engaged in heated discussions about what the latest development portends for them.
With agony and anger visibly written on their faces, they lamented their plight, disclosing the inability of the state government to settle their salary is tantamount to a bleak Sallah for them as well as their families.
Those mostly affected by the salary non-payment are the Muslim adherents who seem to have banked on the payment of their salaries to enable them to fulfill some of the religious obligations attached to the Sallah celebration.
Recall the federal government declared Monday and Tuesday next week as public holidays to mark the Sallah celebrations but from the look of things, local government workers in Edo State will not join their counterparts elsewhere in the merriment.
Going by the Islamic calendar, the Sallah falls on Saturday.
Majority of the local government workers, especially the Muslims among them, decried the action of the state government, maintaining that it was unfair and inhuman for the government to fail to pay them their salary knowing the Sallah festivities fell at the end of the month.
In Edo North, which is predominantly Muslim in population, some of the aggrieved workers said the precarious situation they found themselves in meant they had to think outside of the box to solve the logjam of not slaughtering a ram due to the non-payment of their Salary.
They confided in our reporter that they were compelled by the circumstances to “form” an emergency cooperative society, of say two or three persons, as a way of pooling the needed funds to procure the ram, which is then shared accordingly, as dictated by their faith.
