“Whatever noise we are hearing now is either by those who are yet to be cleared or those who have benefited from the system of inefficiency in the past.
“Anyone who has been certified cleared has been paid salary. To prove our point, we published the names and amounts paid to all workers, ministries, departments and agencies in the state’s website, www.kogistate.gov.ng.”
The governor of Kogi state, Alhaji Yahaya Bello, who made these clarifications through his media aide, Gbenga Olorunpomi in a chat with news men in Abuja today, Thursday, insisted that no civil servant is being owed salary and that the government had paid the salaries of all workers cleared by the recently concluded civil servants verification exercise.
“This government came to power at the time civil servants were on strike; the issue that led to the strike was that of the salaries owed to the workers for many months.
“At that time, all schools in the state were shut down; the government of Governor Yahaya Bello then decided that the only way to tackle this was to do total civil service verification. In the process, we found out that the state had plenty issues; about 83,000 personnel were withdrawing salaries from the state and this is a state that is barely 25 years old.
“So, there was need to do an audit to find out how we got to the situation where there were more senior than junior level civil servants; it was lopsided, the issues necessitated the civil service reform which is part of the five cardinal programmes of the government.”
Olorunpomi said that the exercise had been completed and the state now has a civil service that the government can manage, saying: “all persons that were cleared by whatever committee that was set up at the time were paid. We got our bailout fund to do this. We used the resources that came in from FAAC allocation and we have been paying salaries since then.”
It will be recalled that medical doctors iin the service of the state government have embarked on strike action on the excuse that they have not been paid their salaries for months, with man of them threatening to resign their appointments with the state government. [myad]
