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The Vice Chancellor of the Bayelsa Medical University (BMU), Professor Ebitimitula Etebu has exonerated the State Governor, Senator Douye Diri of any involvement in the decision by the institution to disengage 198 persons from its workforce.
According to him the sacked workers were improperly absorbed in 2019 during the last administration thereby violating the employment rules of the institution.
He disclosed that though the Institution had revert back to status quo over the fate of the 198 workers due to the intervention of the leadership of the Ijaw Youths Council (IYC) and the State Commissioner of Education, Gentle Emela, the institution decided to disengage them due to repeated restive nature of the affected workers and demand for new lecturers needed for the several accredited courses of the Institution.
Etebu who stated this on Tuesday while reacting to claims which accused the Diri administration of alleged sectional sack, said Diri has nothing to do with the decision to disengage the embattled workers of the Institution.
” The current Governor has nothing to do with anything. I am the Vice Chancellor, I told them, because they were trying to destabilize the institution. Every time they were threatening, saying they are going to do this and that. And I told them, I said, look, you have no use to us, you don’t even come to work and if you ask very well, because of the hard times, we have tolerated them for all this while, but the thing is, they are now trying to take advantage of that fact.
“People are telling them,’ they have kept you people as casual workers for this period, you are now entitled to be employed’ and they have also taken that hook line and sinker and threatened the management of the university. They go out and tell lies. These are the ones you are hearing. They go and write on Facebook and collude with the opposition. They use it to malign this current administration just to score cheap points for political gains. The institution decided to step them down due to constant security reports of their threats/restiveness to go on protest and make the University unmanageable” he said.
Etebu, who pointed out that instead of the institution to re-enact the 2018 sad incident at the State owned Niger Delta University, Amassoma where the sack of some workers led to protest and deaths, said the institution had to discontinue the pattern set for the institution by politicians at inception and follow the guideline laid out by the National University Commission (NUC) on employment of workers with the university system having dual employment, one for the lecturer and one for the non-academic staff, and one for the professional in the health profession
