Striking members of staff of Abuja Environmental Protection Board (AEPB) have threatened to shut down all public cemeteries in the Federal Capital Territory (FCT) if their demands were not met.
The threat came after the workers who embarked on an indefinite strike last Tuesday over the failure of the FCT Administration to implement a new salary structure for them, shut down the cemeteries on Wednesday but agreed to reopen them yesterday.
The chairman of Amalgamated Union of Public Corporation, Civil Service Technical and Recreational Services Employees (AUPCTRE) in AEPB, Comrade Muktar Bala, told journalists that if no action was taken, the cemeteries would be shut down indefinitely.
He said the union would also close other operating systems of the environmental board, because the FCT Administration had not placed any priority on the welfare of the members of the union, who were daily exposed to health hazards, including handling of corpses.
“The reopening of the cemeteries on Thursday was temporary to allow for negotiation but will be shut down again if the discussions fail. As the chairman of one of the unions in AEPB, I can assure you that it is a collective decision by the whole union, with backing from the national body.
“People think it is only waste management that we do, they don’t know that even unclaimed corpses in hospitals are taken care of by us. These dead bodies that have overstayed in the hospital for three to four years, we take care of them, without knowing what killed them.
“Hospitals come to us when they want mass burial for such dead bodies. If there are unclaimed or unknown corpses either on the road or elsewhere, the police will write reports and bring them to us for burial.
“All these hazards, people don’t look at them. We want to tell the administration that apart from managing the solid waste, we engage in other things,” he said.
