IN a move designed to exorcise ghost workers from the Kogi State payroll, an exercise so simple and direct ordinarily, the state’s youthful but overwhelmed governor, Yahaya Bello, opted to arm three panels and made a hash of each. Staff verification exercises are an indication of the lassitude and incompetence of Nigerian administrators.
Yet, each state and each organisation that has embarked on such exercises, despite inflicting pain and punishment on workers, has managed to pull it off in just one try. It is not rocket science. But in the case of Kogi State, Mr Bello first twice failed in pulling it off. He is now in his third try, and all indications are that given the complications he has introduced into it, not to say his general lack of altruism and enthusiasm, he will fail yet again. The reason is that with every incompetent attempt to verify the genuine staff on the state’s payroll, the governor manages to swaddle the exercise with increasing complications and chaos.
By his own admission, Mr Bello has done little else worthy of media attention or celebration in his one underwhelmed year in office. It seems his major goal is to cut the state’s staff strength without alarming workers and their families about his real objective of retrenching workers. Lacking in courage and savvy, the governor has thus embarked on a clumsy rigmarole that is taking him through the inextricable and unending labyrinth of staff verification exercises. He is immersed in his third try, and counting, in just one year, with none of the three exercises concluded. There is nothing to indicate that this third effort will end well.
He began the exercise in February last year after he assumed office, by appointing a former army general, Paul Okuntimo, to ferret out the ghosts and put the spectral beings in the furnace where they rightly belonged. A few months into the exorcism, the state and the governor’s ears were deafened by complaints of such severity that it was impossible to ignore. The committee, whose other members totalled 16, was immediately adjudged as incompetent and disbanded and replaced by another one headed by Jerry Agbagi. Both committees could not put even one foot right, let alone forward. But it nonetheless fumbled a report to the government in July. Hunger ravaged the state, and workers groaned. Yet, despite the disaffection the staff audit caused and the hardship and deaths, no one complained that a verification exercise was not needed. They only demanded that the state get its act together.
But of all the remedial steps needed, the state believed it only needed to empanel a new group to redo what the Okutimo/Agbagi-led committees botched. Kogi workers dutifully presented themselves and their dog-eared certificates before the second committee, praying for a quick conclusion and resolution of their salary maladies. The din over the second panel headed by Yakubu Yusuf Okala, leading 24 other panellists, was even much louder and ghoulish. It was no longer clear what the problem was. Was it that the committees were expected to work to a preconceived answer wherein the state’s staff strength would be considerably reduced from the estimated total workforce of 86,000? To do this, the committees would naturally need to be arbitrary and brutal. It achieved both, either by unfair and malevolent design or by incompetent and humiliating juxtapositions, claiming to have uncovered 22,738 ghosts, nearly the staff strength of the state tier of the civil service.
To muffle the complaints and be seen as doing something to give workers some redress, Mr Bello has once again empanelled a new 32-man committee headed by J.Y. Ayuba, a director of studies from the Administrative Staff College of Nigeria (ASCON). The governor designated the new panel as Staff Screening Complaints Appeal Committee. If the ordinary Kogite wondered why such a simple exercise as staff verification needed an expert from outside, he would be even more nonplussed by the composition of this third and exasperating panel. In the panel are an observer from Gombe State, another observer from Kaduna State, yet another so-called independent observer from Zamfara State, and another one from the same Kaduna State bringing the number from that last state to two.
Who ever heard of any state staff screening and verification exercise so ponderous and so foolishly ‘nationally or regionally representative’?
Mr Bello is obviously overwhelmed by an office and position he merely fooled around with during the campaigns. He was of course shooed aside almost as soon as he indicated interest in the job, for neither he himself nor anyone else took him serious. He knew he had no accomplishment to recommend him to the office. And he knew he was so utterly devoid of talent to face the arduous task of statecraft. Therefore, when circumstances foisted him on the state in 2016, he sensibly surrounded himself with mediocrities who would not gnaw at his conscience by reminding him, through an open show of their talents and qualifications, that he was an intellectual and administrative pygmy. But it is the consequent pygmification of Kogi State that has led to confusion and repetition of the verification exercises, delayed or haphazard payment of salaries, stultification of the civil service, and general retrogression of the state. As long as Mr Bello reigns over the state, for that is what he is really doing, Kogi will continue to stagnate.
By Adekunle Ade-Adeleye
