The Acting Head of the Civil Service of the Federation, Yemi Esan has revealed that there is an employment racketeering in all the Ministries, Departments and Agencies MDAs of the Federal Government.
Esan made this revelation Monday before the House of Representatives Committee on Public Service Matters while defending the 2020 Budget p estimates of the Office of Head of Civil Service of the Federation.
She said her office insisted that every employee of the Federal Government must enrol on the Integrated Personnel and Payrol System IPPS due to the worrisome level of employment rackets in MDAs.
According to the Head of Service, many people, including non-civil servants, just type employment and promotion letters and bring to her in the office to sign for them, saying her office discovered that a lot of these employment letters were fake, which prompted the insistence on the IPPS system for salary payment
On the number of civil servants in Nigeria, Esan said there are 77,651 employees of the federal government scattered in all the MDAs stressing that due to the employment racketeering in most MDAs all federal civil servants are hooked up in the website of the OHSCF office.
Defending the 2020 budget of the Head of Service Office, she said a total of N4.8bn was proposed for the personnel, overhead, recurrent and capital expenditure of the office and its agencies.
A breakdown of the budget proposal showed that personnel cost will gulp N2.2bn, overhead cost N1.7 bn, recurrent expenditure N4 bn and capital expenditure is N8093mn.
Meanwhile, the House of Representatives Committee on Diaspora has urged the National Commission for Mass Literacy, Adult and Non-formal Education (NMAC) to utilise the 2019 budget that was released it.
The Committee Chairman, Tolulope Akande-Sadipe (APC-Oyo), who made the appeal during the Commission’s budget defence, expressed shock at the 2020 budget proposal of over N1 billion presented by NMAC.
“You have spent N8mn out of N222mn. If you had spent maybe N120mn and there is some left, I can relate to that. When you look at the percentage of the amount utilised, relative to the release, there is a disconnect, a major issue about process flow. There are processes that should have happened.
“There are issues that have to be looked at with regards to your processes, most especially when you said that there were priority projects and that’s why the diaspora project was not featured in 2019 because of those burning issues”, he said.
Abba Haladu, Executive Secretary of the Commission said that out of the approved budget of more than N900mn, N222mn was made available in September and out of the N222mn released, the Commission had only spent N8mn.
