Thousands of local government workers in Rivers State on Saturday staged a protest in Port Harcourt over what they described as an “illegal and uncoordinated” verification exercise allegedly initiated by the Sole Administrator, Vice Admiral Ibok-Ete Ibas (rtd).
Defying the early morning rains, the workers converged at the Alfred Diete-Spiff Civic Centre, where they said they had been kept since Friday without being attended to, before marching towards the Rivers State Government House to register their grievances.
The protesters accused Vice Admiral Ibas of using the verification exercise as a cover to justify alleged misappropriation of public funds. They also claimed that the process was designed to declare over 15,000 workers as “ghost employees” in order to validate an unverified claim of saving N5 billion from a civil service audit that never took place.
Mrs. Ibim George, a deputy director, alleged that, “Vice Admiral Ibok-Ete Ibas is trying to justify the funds he looted in the name of civil servants’ audit and verification.”
Other workers, who spoke on condition of anonymity, lamented that many staff had been left stranded without salaries for August 2025, as the exercise had yet to capture them. They called for a probe into both the verification process and the alleged billions expended on it without results.
The protest, marked by chants of solidarity songs, reflected growing discontent among workers just days before the expiration of the state of emergency declared by President Bola Tinubu. Vice Admiral Ibas was appointed Sole Administrator to oversee Rivers State following the suspension of the elected governor.
The workers demanded an immediate halt to the exercise and urged federal authorities to investigate what they described as illegality in the handling of Rivers State’s affairs.
