Civil defence claims the N5k was deducted by the cooperative, and not the Corps. The protesters can’t see the difference.
The Nigerian Security and Civil Defence Corps, popularly known as Civil Defence, are protesting at the corp’s headquarters in Abuja and its formations across the country over a N5,000 deduction in their December salaries amidst rising economic hardship, the Peoples Gazette said.
The said amount was deducted as costs for name-tag as evident in the description from the transaction alert seen by Peoples Gazette. The ‘name-tag’ cost was deducted alongside other statutory deductions.
The Gazette learned that civil defense chief, Abubakar Audi, has promised to resolve the matter but the officers are revolting that the name tag is useless because it is part of the standard uniform design and should not have been deducted in the first place, especially amidst harsh economic conditions.
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When The Gazette said it reached out to the corps spokesperson, Sola Odumosu, he said there is no disquiet in the civil defence corps and there is no deduction whatsoever in the officers’ salaries by the corps. He however claimed that the deduction is being made by a voluntary cooperative society that the officers voluntarily joined.
“Let us distinguish cooperative society from the corps. There is no deduction of salaries by the corps.
“The issue of salary deduction should be differentiated from the deduction for name tags. To be clear, when you talk about name tags, there is a cooperative society to which some members voluntarily belong.
“This voluntary membership of the cooperative society requires that monies you contribute will be invested on your behalf and there are projects that the society undertakes on behalf of members who are cooperators. But the issue of name-tag that you’re talking about was discussed at the management level of the cooperative society.
“So let us distinguish the cooperative society from the corps. If there is a deduction on a name tag, it is a deduction by the cooperative society on a consensus agreement of the members of the society, it is not about everybody and does not affect the generality of the corps,” Mr Odumosu said.