…Welcomes Iwuagwu as new Director.
By Williams Odunze
The Imo State Library Board has marked its end of the year party and equally honoured the outgoing Director with other retirees of the board for their immense contributions towards the growth of the establishment.
In a welcome address, the new Director of the library, Dr. Pauline l.Iwuagwu said that it is with immense pleasure that she welcomed all the guests, especially, the retiring senior colleagues of the board for their meritorious services while in active service.
She disclosed that, the event was the first in over ten years that the board had honoured its outgoing director and other retiring senior staff .
She explained that the lull was due to lack of funding from the State governments for so many years.
Iwuagwu, informed that the board is surviving through internal effort made by the management by thinkering outside the box to meet its challenges and running costs.
She also explained that, retiring from service after putting someone’s best for an establishment like the Library Board is not a mere feat ,noting that this is the reason the management choose to honour the retiring colleagues under her very new administration.
” Today, we have gathered here to give honour to those for whom honour is due.
We have come to celebrate outstanding staff that put in decades of their lives into the service of government and the people,” she said.
Earlier, in his remarks, the chairman of the occasion, the Publisher and Editor -in Chief of Nigeria Newspoint Newspaper, Comrade Lambert Ojukwu congratulated the retirees/ awardees for being recognized while alive by the establishment they have helped to grow.
He regretted that, pensioners are not giving the benefits due to them after years of spending their youthful energy serving the public.
Ojukwu pointed out that those at the corridor of power are playing politics with pensioners’ money which he said ought not to be so.
The chairman of the occasion, informed that pensioners’ gratuities are part of their salaries held on trust for them by Government which is supposed to be given to them , expressly on retirement.
In her speech, the outgoing Director, Lady Ijeoma Victoria Akanaga , after receiving the award, thanked the management for the honour given to her.
She expressed gratitude to God for sparing her life all through the 35 years in service and advised the staff and management of the board to work in unity by encouraging one another to keep the establishment moving.
Akanaga narrated that, through out her stay as Director of library services that no subvention was given to he for nine years.
The outgoing Director informed that the Board lost its value after its relocation from the former site to the present location in 2014 under then Governor, Owelle Rochas Anayo Okorocha’s administration .
She alleged that the Okorocha administration starved the board of funds through out his administration.
” When we moved into the present site, we lost readership.
Most of the services we offer were no longer tenable.
“Our major challenge had been that of funding and location.
” In all these years the library never received a dime from the government that ought to cater for the State Library Board ” she lamented.
The high point of the event was exchange of pleasantries between the retiring statf and serving staff of the board and taking of photographs.
