Benjamin Mingle, General Secretary of the Financial Business and Service Employees Union (FBSEU) of the Ghana Federation of Labour (GFL) at the National Lottery Authority (NLA) has said that they are on course in ensuring honouring of wins payment and the safety of the workers.
According to him, the FBSEU wants to ensure that the NLA stands up to its responsibilities by paying the winnings to enable the attacks on the workers to stop.
Mr Benjamin Mingle, in addressing the media after a meeting with the National Labour Commission said “We are watching what’s happening, I can tell you we are on course because the basic thing we want to do is to ensure that the NLA stands up to its responsibilities by paying the winnings so that the attack on workers will stop. For now, we have succeeded in getting the NLA to sit with us. We set up a committee last Thursday to come up with a schedule of payment of the wins dating back from October to now. I have gotten a report from the committee of which I’m told they want to start payment on Friday for the pressure on them to be reduced.”
The non-payment of wins are in arrears as far back as April 2020 with the challenge intensifying since August last year.
Incidentally, the sales of the NLA for the first seven months of 2020, amounted to GH¢161.5 million. On the other hand, prices (wins) also amounted to GH¢89 million for the same period. This means the NLA retained GH¢71.7 million revenue for the seven months of 2020.
For the attack on workers to stop over nonpayment of wins, Mr Mingle revealed that “We will issue a statement to the general public for the attack on workers to stop when payment is started. We also want to assure the workers that we will talk to the police to come to their aid to some level of security going forward.”
Mr Mingle added that they have also initiated the move to deal with the operational challenges of NLA. “We are not in management but our role is to influence policies to make sure that the workers are satisfied with the work that they are doing.”
Last week, the Staff of the NLA suspended their services and are calling for the removal of the Director-General, Kofi Osei-Ameyaw from office for non-payment of wins dating back to almost a year.
The staff are saying the reasons for the call and suspension of work is in line with series of issues from the non-payment of wins and commissions, and management issues including poor working conditions under the current DG and the dwindling fortunes of the Authority.
Meanwhile, the Local Union Chairman of the FBSEU at the NLA, Eric Tamakloe and staff, have labelled a number of corruption allegations against the Director-General.
A number of the allegations span from the DG, owning shares in private lotto companies including Alpha Lotto.
According to them, the tenure of the DG has also ended coupled with his retirement age of 61 years.
In unison, the staff said “We would like to reiterate that this action taken by the union is solely ours and has been necessitated by the non-payment of wins which has led to attacks on our staff, financial mismanagement of funds by the Director-General, Kofi Osei Ameyaw causing a sharp decline in revenue and the non-payment of staff emoluments. There are conspiracy theories that the union is pushing this agenda in favour of certain parties.
We would like to categorically state that the union is only interested in the welfare of its staff and the business and is not politically aligned nor pushing the agenda of any politician or politicians. We are not interested in who replaces the Director-General as long as Mr Kofi Osei Ameyaw is kicked out and the fortunes of the company saved and reinstated”.
