NLC has announced plans to order workers to sit at home if, in seven days, President Muhammadu Buhari’s regime fails to address the cash scarcity.

“We have been frustrated to a level that we can no longer keep quiet,’’ NLC president, Joe Ajaero, declared on Monday in Abuja at the end of an emergency meeting of the Central Working Committee of the NLC.

“The NLC is giving the federal government and agencies under it, including the CBN and other banking institutions, seven working days to address the cash crunch. If they fail to do so at the expiration of the seven working days, the congress is directing all workers in the country to stay at home,” said the NLC president.

Mr Ajaero lamented that “it has become very difficult to access even one naira, especially by traders who do not have bank accounts” and “discovered that even when banks give out old currencies, they cannot be spent. Even when you take them back to the same banks, they do not accept them.”

The NLC president also lamented difficulties experienced at petrol stations.

“At fuel stations where there is petrol, it sells for as much as N350 a litre in some parts of the country. We will no longer be quiet about this issue of perennial fuel scarcity and arbitrary increase in prices,’’ he said.

On the ongoing state council elections of the NLC, Mr Ajaero said some state governors were interfering with the process.

“Some state governors now dictate to the NLC through the chairmen in those states,’’ he said.

The NLC leader alleged that a governor in the South-East openly campaigned that NLC members should vote for a particular candidate.

He explained that NLC’s attempt to resist the approach was met with the manhandling of its officers by hoodlums engaged by the state government.

“They disrupted our election in that state. Our state secretariat has been destroyed by thugs sent by the governor,” Mr Ajaero explained. “The thugs took over that place for three months. The state chairman of the NLC was driven out of the state.”

(NAN)