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The Deputy Secretary General of the Union, Comrade Dele Ojo, while speaking in Kaduna over the weekend said the government should take whatever steps necessary to reopen the closed factories in the interest of the people.
He said, “People are suffering, those displaced when the factories were closed are still in trouble. Even though we do not have the statistics as to how many have lost their lives, we know the situation is such that everybody is concerned about the welfare of the people that were displaced as a result of the closure.”
He said that the union was always in touch with the workers of the closed textile factories with a view of finding solutions to their plight. He said, “The union has been doing a lot in terms of advocacy to draw government’s attention to the plight of the industry and our campaign has made it possible for UNTPL to be reopened because of the provisions of the Bank of Industry (BOI) with a current work force of about 1,500.’’
On Kaduna Textiles Limited (KTL), he said: “We were told recently that the management has been able to woo some investors from Turkey who were interested in making military uniforms, we were told that they have gotten to the stage where investors have shown interest and that they only needed the cooperation of the Ministry of Defence and Ministry of Interior to give them the go ahead so that they can float a garment factory there.
On FINETEX, NOTEX, he said, “I think there was this erroneous belief that their gratuity has not been paid, but because of all the efforts, we were able to convince the chairman of the company, Alhaji Dantata, who made available, about N250million for the gratuity of the workers and this has been paid to the workers. It is not fair for anyone to claim that NOTEX and FINETX gratuity has not been paid because it has been addressed.” On Arewa Textile, he said, “The major problem they have is with Union Bank, we were told that the bank has recovered so much from Arewa Textiles in terms of the debt owed them and we were thinking that the bank will be sympathetic to the workers in carrying out the burden of gratuity for the workers.”
