OYO STATE GOVERNMENT TO SACK 3,000 WORKING WITH FAKE CERTIFICATES

Ibadan — Oyo State government has sacked 3,000 of its workforce found wanting for various offences ranging from forged certificates and falsified ages, among others. Explaining why it embarked on the sack, government said the exercise was imperative to save the integrity of the service. In a statement issued in Ibadan on Sunday 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 offences, according to the release, range from falsified age claims, falsified certificates, 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 engaged the services of a management consultancy outfit called Captain Consulting, to do a thorough audit of the records of all public and civil servants in the state and their positions. After the audit, said the release, the consultancy outfit came up with the list of workers with deficiencies that violated their rules of engagement to the Oyo State

government public and civil service 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 ranksof 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.

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.

culled from the Daily trust newspaper