Commissioner: Why C’ River Reversed LG Teachers’ Salary Adjustment
The Cross River State Commissioner for Local Government Affairs, Chief Victor Felix Idem, has explained that the recent adjustment in the salaries of local government teachers was not a deliberate wage cut, but the reversal of an erroneous upward adjustment that had created a disparity between the earnings of local government teachers and their counterparts employed by the state.
Idem said the action was taken to correct an irregularity in the payroll system and restore uniformity in the remuneration of teachers across the two services.
Idem, who spoke on the controversy surrounding the development, said the government discovered that local government teachers were earning more than their counterparts in the state public service, despite both categories of teachers being placed on the same salary grade levels and performing similar functions.
According to him, “The local government salaries were discovered to be excessively higher” than those of their state counterparts, stressing that the disparity was not the outcome of any duly authorised government policy but arose from an erroneous adjustment in the Local Government Teachers’ Salary Structure.
