No fewer than 5,000 federal civil servants return home without their November and December salaries, according to fresh information available to the media.
National President of the Association of Senior Civil Servants of Nigeria (ASCSN), Dr. Tommy Okon, who disclosed this in Abuja this week lamented that the 5,000 were from the 17,000 workers earlier delisted from the Integrated Personnel and Payroll Information System (IPPIS) in October 2023.
Lamenting that these cases were yet to be resolved, Okon said that these set of civil servants still suffered discrepancies on their date of first appointment and date of birth.
However, he said that that six teams were currently working to ensure that the exercise was completed on time.
“It is advisable for a public servant to develop the habit of checking the HOS Website for regular updates. We have confirmed that the salary for November 2023 is concluded. Therefore, those affected will not get their salaries for November,” Okon stated.
Okon appealed to the Head of the Civil Service of the Federation to speed up action to ensure that December salaries were not delayed.
However, he begged members of the union to exercise patience as everything was being done within the ambits of the laws to ensure that the issues are resolved expeditiously.
Commending the recent promotion examination for Directors aspiring to the office of the Permanent Secretaries, he said that such examinations would serve to increase the efficiency of the civil service as the engine room of government policies.
Okon said: “It is expected that when you rise in your career as a director, you have gotten to the pinnacle of your career. Hence, the position of Permanent Secretary is another kettle of fish, which requires greater responsibility and a broader scope of competence. We are yet to understand how government projects and activities are to be driven effectively without having in place the best hands and brains.
“We cannot continue to pay lip service to the need to scale the quality of the civil servants especially those at the senior level who are expected to demonstrate impeccable character and capability to drive government projects and programmes.
“A situation where only 20 candidates out of 85 demonstrated the requisite knowledge and skill at the written examination and 18 candidates from that number made it to the final stage of the recently concluded selection exercise for the appointment of permanent secretaries leaves little to be imagined about the state of the quality of officers in the Civil Service.”