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Job Osazuwa
It is about three years now since four Nigerians were relieved of their duties by a company in Calabar, Cross River State. But the shock has remained as fresh as ever.
They have described their sack by their former employer, Stallion Motors Limited, an Indian company located in Calabar, Cross River State, as cruel and unjust. Having protested the action and cried to whoever cared to listen but with no reprieve, they headed to court for justice and payment of their entitlements.
After protracted court proceedings, the judgment was recently delivered against them. But one of the lawyers representing the aggrieved workers, Chukwu Hygienus, has vowed to appeal the judgment and promised that justice would prevail at the end.
When the reporter recently spoke with them, the anger in their voices was palpable. They were furious over the alleged injustice they claimed the company meted out to them.
The angry workers, Oluropo Peter Salabiu, Christopher Idris, Idowu Obafemi and Friday Aniete, were on April 29, 2016, sacked by the management of the company where they had worked for many years.
Aniete said his life has not been the same again since he was fired by the company. He lamented that he has been living in penury as he is yet to secure a suitable job that would enable him take good care of the members of his household.
His words: “I am yet to recover from what the company did to me after l had spent many years working for them. To feed my family members is now a huge task. I have been surviving on menial jobs.
“Despite the fact that I sustained injury while working with them, the company refused to pay me the right compensation. I have never seen such oppression in my life. I didn’t ask for what was not due to me but what I worked for. But all my demands fell on deaf ears. It is sad that a foreign company would come to Nigeria to mete out injustice to the citizens and move on without being prosecuted,” he said.
Similarly, his former colleague, Idris, said: “I now beg friends to feed my family members. It has not been easy for me because I have not been able to secure another fairly okay job since Stallion Motors sacked me. After 11 years of serving the company, this is what I am now facing. I have been plunged into real poverty. I have been in the rain since morning doing any available job just to put some food on my family’s table.”
Their disengagement, as clearly stated in their disengagement letters, was that Nigeria’s economy was in recession, hence the need to downsize.
But they protested that they were not only sacked, they were also harassed and humiliated. They alleged that they were treated like common criminals even though they only demanded to know why their services were abruptly terminated.
The letter, dated April 28, 2016, and signed by the human resource/administration manager, read in part: “In view of the continued prevailing economic constraints in the country, which is affecting our group’s businesses, we have no alternative than to reduce our workforce, in order to meet up with the current economic situation.
“Consequently, your appointment with the company is hereby terminated with effect from April 30, 2016.
“In accordance with this, you are requested to hand over all the company’s property in your possession to the HR/admin department before the settlement of your final payment, if any, into your bank account.”
Salabiu had told the reporter in 2016 that, when he was handed the letter, he almost collapsed. He recalled that it was like a bitter pill too difficult for him to swallow.
Recalling what transpired on that fateful day, Salabiu alleged that immediately he got the letter, alongside his colleagues, and after surrendering the company’s property in their possession, the administration officer and a certain Indian man told the company’s security men to deny them access to the premises.
“They knew that their action was wicked, and they thought we were going to make trouble with them. Immediately, the security men walked us out of the company,” he recollected.
Before they were laid off, he claimed that that they were heads in their various departments. While Salabiu headed the spray painting section, Idris was head of the panel-beating department. Aniete, it was gathered, headed the mechanical section and Obafemi was in charge of the air-conditioning section.
As the four pressed for their entitlements from the company, they said they got another shocker. Idris, who worked with the company for close to 11 years, said he received a bank alert of about N450,000 from the company, as his pay-off for his decade of labour. Salabiu’s was worse. He told the reporter that he got a little above N300,000.
Annoyed by the amount given to them, as their total benefits, they said they went out of their way to find out the exact money they were entitled to. Idris claimed that someone that should know told him that he was entitled to N2.6 million, while Salabiu’s entitlements should have been N2.7 million.
Armed with the information, they went back to the company and requested that their exact benefits be paid. But all their explanations were countered by the company’s management, which insisted that they had been paid all that they were entitled to.
Salabiu said, while the argument went on for days, he got a call from a top management staff at the Lagos head office. He said the senior manager advised him to accept his fate and not take any legal action, which would amount to sheer waste of scarce resources at the end of the day.
Said he: “The person said Stallion has money to pay its lawyers, but that we have no money to hire lawyers to defend us. And that, if we did, we would lose out.”
Also lamenting, Idris said: “I have five children plus their mother to look after. I pay N300,000 annual rent for my house. The money they paid me can’t solve any of my problems. How can the seven of us survive? We are not slaves and shouldn’t be treated like slaves.”
Idris said he gave all his heart to the company and never expected to be pushed out like that without a cause.
He complained that, “When I came to the Calabar branch, the company did not make any preparation for us. For three months, we lived like prisoners. They also refused to pay the transportation money to relocate me from my former branch.
“At a point, when they felt that we were complaining too much then, they threatened to sack us. That was why many of us kept quiet. The handbook where our rights are contained was hidden from us until we embarked on a strike. They had always told us that we should bear whatever we see, that there were many Nigerians out there searching for jobs.”
Despite the dissuasion that they should not embark on a fruitless legal process, the four colleagues went on to seek the payment of their entitlements through the court.
Representing Salabiu and his three colleagues, their lawyer, Prof. Tony Ukam, described the company’s action as totally unacceptable.
In a previous chat with Daily Sun at the beginning of the legal tussle, he said the manner in which his clients were relieved of their jobs called for concern. He said Stallion defaulted for not duly adhering to the conditions of service in laying off his clients.
Ukam told the reporter that it was dehumanising for the sacked workers to be pushed out of the company’s premises. He alleged that Stallion so much exploited his clients that he could not just let go. He said it became more insulting when a foreign company was the one subjecting Nigerians to such punishment in their own country.
He disclosed how the company, sometime ago, “craftily” used his clients to train some unskilled new employees with a hidden intention that the new employees would take over from the trainers.
“The person you are using to train another ought to know the purpose he was rendering the service,” Ukam said.
But the company debunked the claims of the workers. A letter written by the company’s solicitors, Bonajo Badejo and Co., dated May 25, 2016, and addressed to Ukam, stated that the company had paid all entitlements that were due to the aggrieved workers, in accordance with the terms and conditions of their contract of agreement, describing their claims as strange.
The letter partly said: “Our client denies the allegation that your clients (Salabiu, Idris, Aniete and Obafemi) were humiliated and harassed out of its premises by security men upon its instructions. Our client merely exercised its right to terminate the contract of employment in accordance with the terms and conditions of the said contract.
“It is important at this stage to correct the erroneous impression, which features prominently in your letter to us that your clients were senior staff as at the time their employments were terminated. Our client maintains that your clients were within the cadre of grade 0004 to 0006 and none of them was a senior staff within the cadre of 0007 to 0009 as alleged.
“Consequently, they were only covered by the provisions relating to staff within the cadre of grade 0004 to 0006, according to which their entitlements were duly paid.”
Having lost the case, with suit number NICN/CA/36/2016, on April 4, Hygienus told the correspondent that he was appealing on the basis that Stallion Motors’ witness in court was incompetent, and added that the testimonies the fellow presented could not be accepted.
“What I mean by an incompetent witness is that a witness who was not in the company when my clients were employed does not have the right to testify over that same act. It runs contrary to the provision of the law as it is enshrined in the Evidence Act. By law, we say that heresy evidence is not admissible because he or she lacks the locus standi to stand before the court and give evidence of what he or she did not see. You cannot put something on nothing and expect it to stand.
“The witness admitted before the judge that everything he told the court was relayed to him by the company’s manager,” Hygienus said.
