By Lawani Mikairu & Daniel Eteghe

Ongoing construction work at the new International Terminal building at the Muritala Muhammed International Airport has suffered disruption due to incessant industrial action and     protest by workers of the China Civil Engineering Construction Company (CCECC).

The terminal which is amongst the five new terminals under construction in Lagos, Kano, Abuja, Enugu and Port-Harcourt since 2013 has in recent times faced a lot of setbacks.   Vanguard was at the construction site of the new terminal where the workers were protesting and gathered that the workers were protesting against the decision of the management of the company to lay them off gradually.

It was further found out that about 3,000 workers had been sacked in June 2015 and more workers were on the line to be sacked by the management of the Company.

The workers who were protesting and chanting solidarity songs with inscriptions on placards “Are we slaves to the Chinese?”, “They don’t care for us, they only care for themselves. We don’t have good take-home pay and we heard that   they got  the permission of the Governor Akinwunmi Ambode of Lagos State to shut down all their construction sites across the state.

Speaking to Vanguard one of the worker, Pastor Douglas Banahene, an Electrical Engineer of the company said that the decision of the company to lay off its workers was because it did not want to hand over the workers to the new company, that was about to take over from it.

Pastor Banahene affirmed that CRCC Construction Company Limited has bought over CCECC but that CCECC has refused to give details of each worker to the new company in order for them to be properly absolved rather they decided to sack them.

He said “Before we came here, we went to Alausa on Wednesday to lay our complaints because what we are passing through is difficult and we cannot bear it as workers anymore which has been for years now, so we decided to meet the Governor to intervene for us, to see how the problem can be resolved but right now, we are here to stop our workers who are still working, we have gone to all our sites across the state to stop our workers pending when they resolve the issue.

The management have been sacking us unnecessarily” “Right now we say they should pay us off, nobody is working again, casual and staff, we are demanding an amount as our pay-off, staff N800,000 and casual N600,000 for each of us apart from our main salary because they are owing us for the month of June 2015”

“They say the minimum wage of a Nigerian worker is N18,000 but we as CCECC workers, we are not captured in the constitution of Nigeria, why? We only have holidays when China is on holidays, we work from Monday to Sunday. 1n 2013, I celebrated my Christmas in CCECC. Now they have been sacking us, they don’t let us know before they even sack us” he added.

Efforts to meet the management of the company to get their own side of the story proved abortive as none of the management staff was on ground during the protest of the workers.

Also, efforts to contact the General Manager Federal Airports Authority of Nigeria (FAAN), Mr. Yakubu Dati to comment on the disruption of work at the new terminal building proved abortive because our correspondent learnt that he was in a board meeting as at the time of filling in this report.