LAGOS – Nigerian aviation staff on Monday blocked roads to the home terminal of Lagos airport, slowing visitors and threatening to delay flights as they started a two-day strike in protest over working conditions and wages.
The strike is probably going so as to add to issues in a sector that often faces jet gasoline shortages, which frequently floor native flights and the place worldwide carriers wrestle to repatriate income from ticket gross sales because of a scarcity of international forex.
Within the business capital Lagos, chanting workers blocked roads to the home terminal, making a visitors jam and forcing passengers to complete their journey on foot. Worldwide flights weren’t affected.
Police and armed forces personnel watched from a distance.
“It is time for us to release aviation workers from the bondage of this imperialist aviation management that we have been having for years,” Abdulrasaq Saidu, secretary basic of the Affiliation of Nigerian Aviation Professionals stated.
Unions representing pilots, engineers, management tower operators and different airport workers say they’re protesting in opposition to unpaid wages, the failure of the federal government to implement a minimal wage for the business and plans to demolish the Lagos workplaces of some aviation businesses to permit enlargement of the airport.
The workers have threatened to strike indefinitely later this month if their grievances will not be addressed.
Earlier in the federal capital Abuja, workers blocked the primary toll highway to the airport, forcing travellers to go away their autos and hop onto motorbikes to entry the terminal buildings.
However the hanging workers later moved and visitors started shifting easily, a DailyKhaleej witness stated.
Lagos and Abuja airport administration suggested travellers to permit additional time to journey to the airport because of the strike.
In northern Kano state, flights had been on schedule though aviation workers picketed on the airport.
Nigeria’s aviation ministry didn’t reply to requests for touch upon Monday.
(Reporting by Seun Sanni and MacDonald Dzirutwe in Lagos, Abraham Achirga in Abuja and Hamza Ibrahim in Kano; Enhancing by Sharon Singleton)
