The governor of Bayelsa State, Henry Seriake Dickson yesterday called on the Federal Government to stay clear of the state’s public service reforms it has embarked on to weed out ghost workers and payroll fraudsters existing in the state civil service.

Dickson represented by his deputy, Rear Admiral Gboribiogha Jonah (rtd) stated this during the state’s monthly transparency media briefing in Government House, Yenagoa, Bayelsa.

Gboribiogha said because the state government hasn’t prosecuted or taken some persons that have falsified their age several times in
service to jail doesn’t mean that government is foolish, stressing it is better they leave the system quietly rather than fight the government.

He said the public service is not intended to witch-hunt any individual but to create job opportunity for the rising number of unemployed youths across the state and that the state would stop at nothing to ensure the state civil service is cleaned up.

Explaining further he said that it is sad that in spite of dwindling revenue inflow and increasing financial obligations the state is
saddled with, the federal government is working against the state’s public service reforms.

He said “All they do is sit at Abuja and insight citizens against their states.

That can’t work. At a time the federal government was borrowing N80bn a month to pay salaries. Facts are there, not that I am guessing.

“They would not tell citizens that but what they say is that they have given the states so much money, why are they downsizing? We have taken the oath to serve this state and if down-sizing is what we have to do to make it better we would do it.”

According to him while tackling the menace of ghost workers and payroll fraudsters in the state civil service “It is like the more you
look the problems you encounter.
The latest one we have encountered now is on the aspect of salary grade falsification.

“And this is the most difficult one we are facing right now. So we are ready to clean the public service system up and by the time we are done we are going to computerise the system so that that would be no room for falsification.”

He said the state is committed to pursuing the public service reform to its end because “what the federal government is trying to do is to compute the GDP of every state and if that is done and we don’t take these steps Bayelsa would be rated as a backward state.”

Giving the account of the income and expenditure of the state for the month of April 2018, he said the allocation that accrued to the state dropped by N774 million compared to what the state received in the month of March 2018.

According to his record, the state received N14.59 billion from the federation account and N1.24 billion internally Generated Revenue
(IGR), bring it to N15.83 billion.

Giving more insight he said the state spent the sum of N15.06 billion to service wage bill, recurrent and capital expenditure, leaving a
balance of N77.55 million. “If you add this to a balance of N7.57 billion we had in the month of March 2018, the state is left with a
balance of N7.6 billion.”

Also Speaking, the commissioner for information, Mr Iworiso Markson called on Bayelsans not to take the public service reforms being conducted by the state for granted, calling on all stakeholders including the media to help educate the people about the importance of the steps taken by the state government.

“Bayelsans are taking the reform agenda of government for granted but unknown to many Bayelsans, we have achieved so much in our effort to reform some of the abnormalities in the civil service and what most people don’t know is that if we don’t do this then we stand the risk of perhaps don’t have a state in the near future.

“Our world today is very dynamic because society is moving at a very fast pace. We think that we are so wealthy, yes we are but we are not harnessing half of the opportunities that we have as a state.

If we must do that we must do a proper in-house cleaning and that is what we are doing with the reforms”.

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