The last has not been heard about the 4029 sacked staff of the National Identity Management System, (NIMS) as they  took the case to the National Assembly again, recently.

The sacked workers, visibly angry blocked the main entrance to the National Assembly, barring the lawmakers from entering the complex.

The protesters defied the warnings of security operatives in the National Assembly entreaties by the Deputy Senate Leader, Senator Abdul Ningi, and the Minority Leader, Senator George Akume, to seek other peaceful means of resolution.

The chairman of the group, Mr Ushe Fidelis said the sacked workers were not happy over the way the lawmakers  treating the matter. According to fidelis, they had on no less than four occasions made peaceful protests to the National Assembly complex with no result.

“We have had three peaceful protests like this three times not counting the many times we have met with executives and submitted our petitions. “The committees have called for general hearing between the management of NIMC and us and the Barrister Chris went on to say he will disengage 4029 staff and employ 18900 staff. We are trained staff, we have experience so we should be called back. This is a highly political matter,” he said.

The Senate leadership however, assured them that their grievances would be looked into and told them to forward their petition to the Senate for consideration.

Reacting to the development, Director-General of the NIMC, Barr Chris  Onyemene, explained that the sack of its staff members is aimed at achieving accelerated implementation of the National Identity Management System (NIMS).

Onyemene stated that the human resource restructuring process, was necessary because most of the NIMC workflow process required special skilled staff that was not obtainable in the staff members inherited from the former Department for National Civic Registration (DNCR).

According to Onyemene “Some of the affected workers had moral questions of falsified certificates and the NIMC cannot trust them with the process of identity management of other Nigerians which demanded integrity,” he said.

The NIMC boss also stated that majority of the over 10,000 workers that NIMC inherited at creation in 2007 from the defunct DNCR were ghost workers, declaring that some of them had employment in other organisations, while collecting salaries from NIMC.

“Management took certain decisions to address these immediate challenges; first was to ascertain the nominal roll of over 10,200 people. At the end of the exercise, we could not account for over 3,000 members of staff inherited from DNCR,” he said.

The House of Representatives committee on Public Petition had two months ago held a public hearing on the matter giving the workers and the leadership of the commission an opportunity to present their sides of the story for easy intervention, which the affected workers said they had obliged, but could not confirm that of the commission’s leadership.