Dr Folasade Yemi-Esan, Head of the Civil Service of the Federation (HOCSF), said some civil servants have resigned their appointments over failure to carry out the recent physical verification exercise by her office.
Yemi-Esan stated this when she held Media Chat with Chief Executive Officers, reporters from different media houses on Wednesday in Abuja, being part of activities to mark 2024 Civil Service Week.
According to her, the verification exercise is one of the measures by her office to check corruption practices so as to run the smooth service desired by the Federal Government to reposition the Nigerian public service sector.
“Recently, there was a circular that went out to all Ministries, Departments and Agencies (MDAs) and parastatals that, they should do a physical headcount in their MDAs.
“That means that everybody on the nominal roll that is receiving salaries should appear physically
and that they should forward the names of the people that are not around.
“And I put in the circular that Permanent Secretaries and CEOs that give wrong information will be held liable if anything is discovered outside of the information that was given.”
The HOS said the immediate action by the government after the exercise was to stop the salaries of those whom in one way or the other have left the service without proper documentation while they were still earning salaries.
“The immediate thing that we are going to do, based on that information is to stop the salaries.
“But from what I even saw, the number of people that have gone out of the country and that they are earning salaries is not even in the core ministries, is more in the parastatals .
“I have done an overview of the report that was sent to me and most of this is from the MDAs.
“And I actually called one of them, the head of an agency and said these numbers you’ve sent to the office of the HOS as people earning salaries and they are not on their desks is so huge and how did you come about it.”
Yemi-Esan said the reply she got was that some civil servants returned had to return from the UK after the verification exercise for about two weeks to be verified.
She said, “The Head of that agency said he discovered that, after the verification, some of them rushed from the UK and came about a week after, to do their own verification.
“And they now came to me and said aah! Oga, we are around, they’ve heard they did verification.
“He now told them okay, come back in two weeks time to do the verification because he knew there’s nobody in the UK that will give them leave for another two weeks. “
The HOS said from the incident narrated to her, most of the affected workers had to resign their appointments because they knew that the game was over.
“And again, a very top official too called me and said aah, my nephew is outside the country and he said they are doing verification in his office, what does that mean for him and I asked, does your nephew has official permission to be out of his office.
“He said aah, you know these young people and I answered, well that’s means he has lost the job and he said, you can’t do that oooh, what if he doesn’t work out there and he wants to come back.
“And I said there are millions of people waiting to be employed here in Nigeria, ” she said.
Yemi-Esan had also used the medium to appreciate Media partners whom she described had been the backbone for the successful reforms carried out by her office since her resumption of duty as the Head of Service of the Federation.
The theme for 2024 celebration is ‘Educate an African Fit for the 21st Century: Building Resilient Education Systems for Increased Access to Inclusive, Lifelong, Quality and Relevant Learning in Africa’.