Prof Jasper Jumbo (right), chairman, Jumbo Major House of Bonny explaining a point during a meeting of the house in Port Harcourt flanked by purity Jumbo and Fedelis Jumbo. Photo: Ibioye Diama

After the one week ex
tension of resumption date of schools in Akwa Ibom State due to Ebola virus, teachers in public schools have refused to go back to classes, even as they have issued a ‘no pay, no work’ threat to the state government.
A visit to some public schools in Uyo, the state capital, revealed that students were denied access to some schools as the gates were still under lock and keys.
Some parents of boarders who took their wards back to schools were denied access.
The face-off between teachers and the state government and the consequent strike, our correspondent gathered, resulted from non-payment of salaries to teachers who were not captured during the biometric exercise, promotion arrears of 2009, 2011 and 2012, leave grant of 2013/2014 and 7.5 per cent refund of housing scheme from 2005 to 2012.
One of the teachers who pleaded anonymity explained that even teachers who were captured during the biometric exercise also decided to embark on a sympathy strike in support of their colleagues.
Although primary school teachers are basically affected by the non-payment, the secondary school teachers, our source said, considered such treatment on the part of the state government as a deliberate measure to inflict hardship on families of the teachers.
“We had to wait for about three months for the biometric protocols to be over, before we could get our salaries; that was so much hardship already.
“Now, these teachers may have been omitted for reasons not really their faults; some may not have got the needed awareness during the exercise; some may have been hospitalised or however, and for that reason you deny them of the salaries they had worked for.
“Have they thought of families where both couples are teachers and both may have been affected? It’s not right at all,” she stated.
At CCC, Uyo, some students were seen hanging around the gate and waiting for some hours without teachers.
One of the students who spoke with our correspondent said, “Yesterday we were here and there was no teacher and we waited till 12 noon. Our greatest worry is that no one is here to talk to us”.
An anonymous teacher who spoke to our correspondent by the gate house said she was only in school because she stays within the school compound.
She explained that secondary school teachers were in solidarity strike with their primary school counterparts as injury to one is injury to all.
When contacted on phone, the Chairman, NUT, Akwa Ibom State chapter, Comrade Etim Ukpong, said, “My sister, I can’t say much on that issue for now, there is no clarification yet”.