By Sunday Lawan, Lafia
Staff of Doma local government area of Nasarawa State on Wednesday locked up the council chairman, Rabo Sani, for over three hours over unpaid salary for the month of September. 
The council staff accused the chairman of creating unnecessary hardship for workers compounded by his persistent absence from office.
A worker who pleaded anonimity said despite the swift Intervention by men of the 123 Special Forces Army Barrack, Doma, to restore normalcy, workers in their hundreds held the council boss hostage for over three hours.
The meeting which ensued while the chairman was being held hostage ended in deadlock, and there is no end insight as the chairman could not give satisfactory explanation as to what happened to the September salary.
Sani, while briefing the rampaging workers attributed the hiccups that led to the situation to over bloated staff strength and the payment of part of the liability inherited by his administration to the tune of N100m from his predecessor.
“With the commencement of Local Government autonomy, our problems surfaced because what we normally do before the autonomy was to augment salaries of few council’s with those with less financial burden”.
“From June, July and August, we have to augment our salary with N28m from Value Added Tax (VAT) and the committee on Local Government has stopped us from augmenting salary from VAT and insisted that Value Added Tax was meant for capital project” he said.
When asked on the way out, the chairman said that he approached a bank to collect an overdraft but to no avail, saying bank told him they won’t  grant an overdraft exceeding N20m without the prior knowledge of their head office.
Findings by our reporter revealed that that three out of the thirteen local government areas in the state are yet to pay their workers for the month of September. 
The affected local governments are Doma, Lafia and Nasarawa Eggon.
Nasarawa Eggon local government it was further gathered had not pay its workers for three months and the council boss is nowhere to be seen.