The Federal Government has in the last year uncovered 1,618 officers in the Civil Service with illegal and fake employment letters and has deleted them from the Integration Personnel Payroll and Information System (IPPIS).
Head of Civil Service of the Federation, Dr Folasade Yemi-Esan made this known in Abuja, during a media parley organized as part of programmes marking the 2024 Civil Service Week, with a theme: Education an African fit for the 21st Century: Building Resilient Education System for Increased Access to Inclusive Longlife, Quality and relevant Learning in Africa.
She disclosed that through physical verification conducted by MDAs of the Government, the once over-bloated federal civil service has now been brought down from over 100,000 to 69,308 who have been verified and are on the payroll. Yemi-Esan revealed that apart from the ghost workers who were parading fake employment letters, there was also the issue of some civil servants who “Japa” for greener pastures overseas and were caught napping during the physical verification exercise.
According to her, some of them who came into the country for the verification exercise one or two weeks after the exercise had been conducted under the pretext that they were not aware of the scheduled physical verification exercise, were graciously given two weeks to appear for the verification exercise.
The Head of Civil Service of the Federation said peculiarly, instead of waiting for the two weeks in addition to the days they had already spent in Nigeria, “a lot of them tendered their resignation letters because no UK organization could afford to give two additional weeks in the country to perfect the verification process.
On the issue of endemic corruption in the public service, Dr Yemi-Esan said her office has been working in synergy with ICPC and EFCC to remove such gaps and stomp out such duplicitous acts from the system.
