Head count: Don’t distort your biometric data, Wada warns civil servants

From Omale Adama, Lokoja

As the headcount of civil servants, enters week two in Kogi state, the state Governor, Captain Idris Wada has warned civil servants in the state to desist from falsifying their age in order to guarantee their years of service.

The Governor, during an unscheduled assessment of the ongoing Bio-date screening exercise for civil servants in the state, whose wage bill had risen astronomically in recent months due to perceived activities of ghost workers, gave the advise on Monday..

Wada maintained that the exercise was aimed at putting the civil service records straight, hence the need for them to give their accurate data for a successful exercise even as the fear of mass retrenchment has gripped the entire workforce.

The governor however assured them that government was making adequate arrangement to make sure that those who have attained the age of retirement will have their full benefits at the most appropriate time.

Captain Wada commended the Sky Bank plc, handling the exercise for a job welldone even as he pleaded with them to ensure that due process was followed as government would not spare those found wanting.

He assured the civil servants that the exercise was not meant to witch hunt them, saying that at the end the exercise whatever the state was able to recover would be used to better the lots of the people.

The leader of the screening team, Mrs. Debora Ogumola, disclosed that some of the problems militating against the exercise include, among others, falsification of age, lack of government approval for those employed in 2004 and illegal replacement. She stated however,that they had put in place adequate measures to detect any fraudulent acts, one of which is, asking the civil servants to come along with their secret files, data capturing and so on.

The representative of Labour, Mallam Usman Balarabe, while also speaking, assured the governor of Labour’s readiness to cooperate with government in ensuring success of the exercise and appealed to the governor to implement the outcome of the exercise.