BIPC explains sacking of 44 staff
The management of Benue Investment and Property Company (BIPC) has explained that the recent disengagement of its 44 staff was intended to save the establishment from total collapse.
Benue/Plateau Trust reports that the social media in the past few days had been awashed with accusations against the management of BIPC for sacking some of its personnel on basis of alleged, “clannish agenda.”
But, Managing Director of BIPC, Barrister Alex Adum, who made the explanation at a press conference in Makurdi, noted that it became necessary to embark on the action so as to preserve the future of the entity.
“We have challenges of liquidity because our investment incomes are not generating returns. So that’s why we carried out the exercise,” he said.
Adum added that among the properties owned by the establishment, the guest house, alone, located in North bank, a suburb of Makurdi, incurs a loss of N66 million annually as it runs a personnel cost of N4.1million monthly while its turnover in a whole year stood just a little over N1million.
He said that even if the company was put up for liquidation, there would still be jobs loss, stressing that the need to cut down cost in order to revive the establishment became the best option to do the inevitable and that was why the management chose to restructure in line with the stakeholders decision.
The managing director who insisted that BIPC was not a mass employment company explained that some of the disengaged staff had no clear mandate to work for the organisation, adding that the establishment existed to help in the speedy development of the state especially in the area of commerce and industries, “but most of them (staff) have no schedules.”
He said that the company, which had 66 staff as at 2016 out of which one died and three were forced to exit, suddenly increased its workforce from 66 to 204 between 2016 and 2018 without a commiserate need for the staff.
The managing director who is less than two months on the job, accused two of his predecessors of swelling the staff roll through employments done on political leanings.
He further disclosed that more staff would be disengaged because a situation where over N130 million worth of salary is being expended on 204 staff alone monthly is counterproductive.
He emphasised, “we will not succumb to people using the social media to blackmail and deter us from doing the right thing. He said with the retrenchment, the wage bill has dropped from N130 million in August 2019 to N42 Million.”