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In Niger State, The Dead Draw Salaries — SSG by henroe2k2(m): 6:42pm On Sep 13, 2014 |
Alhaji Hamidu Kadi-Kuta was appointed Head of Service, Niger State about three months ago. He was Chief of Protocol during the immediate past administration. He also served as Permanent Secretary in some ministries. In this interview, the Head of Service bares his mind on his appointment, challenges and his vision for the state civil service. Recently, you were appointed as the Head of Service in Niger State, how did you receive the appointment? Did you envisage it? To be honest, I didn’t expect it. You may not rate me among the super ambitious individuals. I went through the service and put in my best. Anywhere I found myself, I did my best and I never looked beyond my nose in terms of progression. I leave that to God and those who see me perform. I never imagined that I will become the Head of Service one day. For the Permanent Secretary position,I may have prayed and I got it. That I was sure, but Head of Service, I never ever thought of it and I will tell you why. In Niger State until now, that position, you don’t even know how to place it. Is it a regular career civil service routine post or was it a political position. If you look back, you will see the office as political as far as I am concerned, so when my name was announced as the new Head of Service, I was lost because up till the last minute when my name was called, I was not sure. How many years to go in the civil service? I still have 4-5 years to go. How have you been coping with the new office? I see the position as an enhanced position to perform better with almost the same routine I have been used to. It is almost the same job a Permanent Secretary will be doing and I have been doing this because I have been there before. I was in that office for nearly five years as Permanent Secretary, Management Service and most of the things I am handling now were based on the circular I issued that time. So I find it easy. One thing with administration is that if you are dispassionate about it, you are not personal or emotional, you have no problem. Everybody will come with his own issue and you treat it on merit. My concern is the long standing inactivity of the civil service. Despite the huge resources invested in the system, we are far away from where we are going. Not one third of the population of the civil service actually appreciates or understands the concept of the 3:2020 project of the Chief Servant aimed at placing the state as the third best economy in the country by the year 2020. Even some of the Permanent Secretaries don’t have that flair for the future. So all the training we are doing is to now bring them out of the pit because we are getting too far behind compared to other states. In terms of qualifications, I see a lot coming in. I have seen so much training going on but the implementation or application for the overall interest of the system is what is lacking. Are you insinuating that those certificates are fake or not legally acquired? I don’t think so because the schools, the institutions have been sensitized. The system has a way of rejecting fake certificates and I will tell you how we do it. Before you leave for training, there are processes you have to follow. We have a policy and you go within that training policy, i.e., training manual. Once you are in school, you identify with the Department of Establishment that you are o training and the course you are going for has been identified already and the institution you are going is also understood and so you cannot then come back with a certificate either before you end the course because, after the course, you are to defend what you have acquired and we also find out whether your certificates is genuine or not. We are not talking about the certificate here but the productivity of civil servants after attending courses because it is being said that some of the top civil servants cannot even raise a simple *MEMO. That is what I was saying earlier that one third of the civil servants don’t understand the import of the entire thing. That is the truth and, worse still, the directorate cadre, as we have it now, should be the driver of the civil service, but I can assure you that we still have a long way to go with the top cadre. Indeed, we have a lot of work to do. After coming back from those courses, are civil servants subjected to examinations to qualify them for promotion and those who don’t live up to expectation, you do away with them or is there any law in the pipeline to flush out those who cannot make it? Civil Service laws are already there. You cannot attempt an examination more than three times on the same position and remain in service. Until this administration, promotions were supposed to be mass. Whether there is vacancy or you are qualified to be there, people just fill the gap, but now, it is not so. You cannot just move en-mass because, one, there must be vacancy and you must have qualified and you must satisfy the conditions laid down for the next grade. We also introduced retreat which is to sit for lectures, sit for examination and pass or fail; if you pass, you are elevated, if you fail, you are demoted to your previous grade. This actually costs money especially to conduct promotion exams for all cadres; so what we are planning for now is in-house retreat for the promotion of those concerned and the state Civil Service Commission is capable of doing this beautifully. How do you differentiate politics from civil service because there are a lot of politicians still serving? That’s right, but, you see, politicians come from two directions. We have civil servants who opt to serve at political level and they are allowed by the rule of the game. One can easily go in, serve politically and come back. The only thing is that you must apply to be absent on leave for the period of serving. The law allows it even to carry party cards but the only thing is that you cannot contest without retiring or resigning from your post. What is the numerical strength of the civil servants now and what is the exact requirement of the state? The numerical strength of civil servants in the state now is put at thirty thousand but the ultimate number of the civil service is determinable by the quality of the population and not by fiat. If you give me the option, I will say it shouldn’t be like that. Let us see, first, how are they, where do they belong and how qualified are they? We are not going for number but quality of service. For instance now, we have up to 40-50% that we can say are round pegs in round holes and this is not good enough. And the state government cannot weed out the unproductive civil servants? We can weed. Why not but the implications are vast. If you weed, what will they be doing in the community? It will then amount to robbing Peter and paying Paul. As far as I am concerned in this state, there is no any other source of employment except the civil service. Though government is not a welfare organization, it spends more money on paying salaries and other allowances than the development of the state. What is helping us out is the good initiative of the Chief Servant, Dr. Mua’zu Babangida Aliyu, in the introduction of Public Partnership Project (PPP). Another problem we are facing is that people just don’t want to leave the service. There are people known to have changed their dates of employment and other relevant information in the past simply because they don’t want to leave and they go on changing every time. Some even carry the CVs of their children looking for job in the same system. You know I have been there and I know what I am talking about. They don’t want to leave and they are asking government to take their children again. They should leave the positions for their children to take over. One of the problems confronting most of these workers and why they don’t want to leave is the world of unknown especially how to get their pension and their gratuity after disengaging. I don’t think so. In 2007 when the Chief Servant came in, that time coincided with the new pension scheme; so in Niger State, we are already 4-5years into that implementation. This is the first time in Niger that government dedicates fund every month for the payment of pension and gratuity. I can also assure you that 60% of civil servants in this state are on the new pension scheme. Only 20% that will soon retire are on the old scheme, so I don’t think it is the fear. What is the fear is that most of the civil servants don’t have an idea of what to do after service, i.e., post retirement programmes. Most of them don’t think of anything. In fact, most of them see their final package, i.e., gratuity as what to expend on what they want to do which is risky. It is really suicidal because no matter what they give you when you retire and you have no plans while in service, you are finished. You don’t have the skill to do business, you don’t have the acumen, you have the society to take care of, you have politics playing around you because another temptation is that the moment a civil servant gets out there, some of them go into politics and the money is gone, and the civil servant will be lost. Are you then planning to organize a pre-retirement seminar for your people to get them prepared? That is what we are doing now. That is the new style because since the assumption of office of the Chief Servant, Dr. Babangida Aliyu, he has always emphasized the need to renew our curriculum in schools to introduce skill and technology. ‘Go there and be self-reliant; when you finish school, you don’t need to come out and be looking for government jobs’, but it is only those who have between 10-15years to serve that can pick up that kind of skill, those who have less than 2years to go, what would they do? The work force now is about 40% of those to retire in the next five years. We should also remember that in the past administrations, there had not been employment until when the present administration took over. The Chief Servant when he took over looked at some critical service areas and he has allowed it. In other words, what we are dealing mostly with in the civil service are old and retiring public officers who have lost interest in the civil service and who don’t have any skill at all and who you cannot sell the idea to. These are some of the challenges we are facing in post-retirement life. Ghost workers have always been a problem at local, state and even federal levels; what is the situation like in the state? That is another challenge which I can also refer to as a disaster and it all goes down to that life outside there. What do I do when I get out there and so let me acquire and acquire by all means?; so ghost workers exist, but serious efforts have been made to flush a lot of them out of service. In fact, as I speak with you, about four thousand have been identified and flushed out. However, we have realized that we have to review the style of flushing out. We go out and tell them to present their credentials to prove that they are civil servants, but still, some of them don’t come thereby making it difficult to identify and catch them. We discovered in the exercise that one person has four to five different accounts collecting money from government. These are people supposed to undergo serious punishments. They will not only lose their jobs, they will also be prosecuted. About how may many have been caught in that category. Oh! Plenty. Why I cannot tell you the figure is because the firm handling the exercise is still on and I don’t want to pre-empt their report because they are almost finishing. Meanwhile, those caught are already listed and we know who they are. The first step is to deny them access to funds; they don’t even know what is happening to them now and they are going round lobbying and begging. http://www.vanguardngr.com/2014/09/niger-dead-draw-salaries-ssg/ |
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