The staff verification exercise embarked upon by the Kogi state government has been on for one year with its attendant twists and turns, Yinka Oladoyinbo, in this report writes on the pains and gains of the exercise, including the drama following discovery of ghost workers.
WHEN the Kogi state governor, Alhaji Yahaya Bello, assumed office on January 27, 2016, one of the major issues he pledged to tackle is corruption in the state civil service. Before he became governor, the 85, 000 staff strength figure of the state had been a contentious issue. There was the need to conduct a staff screening/audit to ascertain the genuine workers on governments’ payroll.
Prior to the coming of Bello attempts were made to trim the workforce but at streamline the with little or no result. The most prominent of such efforts was the Sally Tibot committee set up by the government of Alhaji Ibrahim Idris to look into the issue. However, after much ado and the completion of the committee’s assignment, its report was implemented but some workers went to court to challenge the report of the committee.
The complaints in many quarters then were that some civil servants were benefiting from the over bloated payroll of the state and local governments. Some civil servants in the state were allegedly flaunting wealth and properties that were above their means. A large chunk of money that would have been used for development, it was said, was going into private pockets.
The development therefore prompted Bello to constitute a committee led by Brig-General Olusola Okuntimo (rtd) on Monday, February 22, 2016 with the mandate to conduct the staff verification exercise. Okuntimo later resigned and was replaced with Dr Jerry Agbaji and later the state Auditor General, Yakubu Okala, who completed the assignment and submitted the report of the committee.
However, the submission of the final report of the committee caused some ripples with workers in some of the local government areas taking to the street to protest what they referred to as unjust exclusion from the lists of cleared workers. Some of the workers argued that their names were on the list of those cleared in the interim report of the committee with some of them receiving salary up to August or December 2016. But they claimed that they were surprised and disappointed when their names were omitted in the final report of the committee
As a result of the numerous complaints the governor constituted another 32-man committee, which was given the mandate to examine the genuiness of the complaints.
“The system we met on ground has never assisted the state. We have an overbloated workforce on which billions of naira that should have been used for development is being spent. Our people should just be patient with us and cooperate with the appeal committee that has been loking into cases of people with genuine complaints, because at the end of this screening we will want to have a clean payroll,” Governor Bello said.
But while it happened that some of the workers and pensioners have genuine complaints about their status many of them may soon find themselves behind the bar, as they may be prosecuted based on their confessions before the appeal committee. In a dramatic twist ,some of the complainants are turning around to be pleading for soft landing after it was proved that they have either fake or falsified documents.
During one of the sittings of the committee, it was discovered that a woman said to have been offered appointment by a former deputy governor in the state (names withheld) as a medical officer was collecting a salary bigger than that of a medical doctor, despite being an agricultural officer. Apart from this, the committee discovered that her salary as a political appointee continued five years after the deputy governor that employed her had left office and she had to be reverted to her normal level as an agricultural officer.
Also, many of the workers were discovered to have altered their documents ranging from qualifications and declaration of age. Some of them, the committee found out, have two or three different age declarations in their files, in an attempt to elongate their period of service beyond the legal 60 years of age.
Speaking on the various revelations during the screening, the chairman of the last screening committee, who is also a member of the appeal panel, said the committee discovered a situation where those in charge of pension diverted N225 million of the senior citizens’ money through the connivance of a micro finance bank.
“The committee found out that one John Momoh Atabor, of the state pension board, had been diverting funds meant for payment of pension into his personal account,” Okala, a member of the screening committee sid. He added that rather than returning such money to government’s coffers after reconciliation, “the worker was found to have substituted pensioners’ accounts with his salary account number.”
He said the same Atabor receives salary from government and is at the same time placed himself on pension, adding that findings by the committee showed that he had siphoned N4.3 million of public funds.
According to Okala, the next stage after the staff verification exercise would be the introduction of bio-data for all workers on the payroll of government.
“We are migrating the state workers to electronic data management system, the process is to overhaul the civil service and reform the system for better service delivery,” he said.
The state chairman of the Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC), Onuh Edoka, however noted that despite all the complaints about the screening, the exercise had led to attitudinal change among the workers. “The screening had made the workers to brace up and change their attitudes to many of the things they had hitherto taken for granted in their line of duty, that is the good thing about it,” Edoka said.
Credits: Yinka Oladoyinbo | Tribune
