Imported User:
The Oyo State government has sacked 3,000 persons from its workforce found wanting for various offences, including forged certificates and falsified ages, among others.
Explaining why it embarked on the exercise, government said the exercise was imperative to restore integrity to the service.
In a statement issued in Ibadan yesterday and signed by the Special Adviser, Media, to Governor Abiola Ajimobi, Dr. Festus Adedayo, government explained that those affected were staff identified to have run foul of their rules of engagement.
The offenders included ghost workers who had no letter of appointment or who were retired but were still on the payroll of government, as well as staff who possessed outstanding disciplinary cases against them.
Explaining how government came about the list, the release said that the current administration in the state inherited the staff rationalisation list from the immediate past government, which had engaged the services of a management consultancy outfit called Captain Consultin, to do a thorough audit of the records of all public servants in the state.
After the audit, said the release, the consultancy outfit came up with the list of workers with deficiencies, which it presented to the immediate past government.
According to the government, when the Ajimobi administration came into office, even though it was persuaded that allowing indicted workers to stay in the service would affect the morale of workers with genuine documents and was against the rules of equity and fair-play, as well as constituting a potential pollution in the ranks of workers in the state, government immediately initiated a public service process of giving these workers the rights of fair hearing by setting up a panel to review the consultant’s reports.
Furthermore, said the release, government secured an indemnity from the consulting firm to further ascertain that due process was followed in the exercise of compiling the list of the affected staff.
The government said that, after the exercise of painstakingly verifying the veracity of the claims of the consulting outfit, many of the workers who were exonerated by the panel had their names removed from the list and are not affected by the current cleansing exercise.
“The Oyo State government is committed to improving the lot of workers in the state. It has done this in the last one year by paying more attention to workers’ welfare and promotion as at when due. It will not, in the spirit of the new Oyo State that it is bent on having, continue to abet the continued service of workers who forged their certificates, ages or who violated their rules of engagement, to stay a day longer in the workforce. It is like a cancer which, if not promptly checked, can eat up the whole of the system,” the statement said.
Meanwhile, Governor Ajimobi will today (Monday) swear in 11 Permanent Secretaries recently promoted in the state civil service.
