A rights group, Access to Justice (A2J), has urged the Nigerian Ports Authority (NPA) to obey a Federal High Court judgment which directed it to reinstate and redeploy its dismissed workers.
Justice Okon Abang, on May 22 last year held that the NPA should deploy to their departments, several of its trainees/employees from its technical centre who had successfully completed their technical training in 2007.
The court held that by their conditions of service, they were established staff, and that NPA’s continued refusal to deploy them and pay their salaries for over 10 years was unlawful, wrongful and illegal.
The court ordered that the trainees/employees be deployed and paid their salaries forthwith.
Despite the judgment, NPA is yet reinstate or pay the workers who have waited 11 years for justice to be done.
A2J, in a statement by its Director Joseph Otteh, said: “The lives of these trainees/employees have been broken and have remained so over a long, endless period now. Many of them are now destitute, and live from hand to mouth, and then only from the charity of friends and relatives.
“Among them are many whose families have disintegrated due to privations and hardships, and those whose children have long been out of school because of the circumstances of their parents.
“The extent and ramifications of what these trainees have endured is hard to imagine. It is extremely inequitable, unjust and unfair to make these Nigerians wait a day longer before the injustices against them are remedied.
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