What to do with the albatross of a large and unwieldy Nigerian Civil Service has engaged the attention of Nigerian presidents and technocrats, tasking their intelligence to the utmost. Standing at several scores of thousands and gulping about N1 trillion in salaries and other emoluments yearly, the story of the Nigerian Civil Service should have been cheering and a veritable source of immense potential but it is far from that. In fact, it is such a grossly inefficient mass and a parasitic burden sucking the nation's resources dry and begging to be pared down or shed every time.A high degree of insolence, laziness, exasperating indiscipline that make the body crawl, low morale/productivity and uninspiring leadership, offices that are shrines of tortuous bureaucracy, an array of old tables and chairs creaking like happy mice and shelves sagging and threatening to collapse under tomes of dog-eared files spewing out blackening papers held together with all manner of funny ropes, threads and worn-out, inelastic rubber bands are features in several federal and state government offices. In essence, there is so much laziness and laxity that can never be accepted in the private sector that operate in the civil and public service.Splitting and yawning cement floors on which are littered ledgers and documents that had either been badly chewed by rodents and cockroaches or wetted by the rain over time through leaking roofs and windows bereft of panes and glasses.Everywhere, drawers that are coming apart assault the eyes and on notice boards you could almost see circulars from the Lugardian era or last century. Amidst this confusion, you see a crop of civil servants chatting their heads off and throwing sex banters all day long while work lags behind or stands still. A couple of them will have their legs stretched out on the tables in from of them snoring away the time under some antiquity of fans struggling to oscillate and wheeze out stifling air. Who cares'With the strength of the Oyo State Civil Service standing at 38,000, the current administration inherited one of the largest government workforces in Nigeria and the largest in the south western part of the country after Lagos State's.Smelling a rat, the immediate past administration headed by Chief Christopher Alao-Akala had engaged the services of a human resources management consulting firm called Captain Consultin, to carry out a thorough audit of records of all government staff in the state, vis a vis their offices and positions.After several months of painstaking investigations, the staff auditing firm unearthed a can of worms: about 3,000 so-called government staff had been drawing salaries and allowances running into several millions of naira monthly from the coffers of the state government illegally for several years! Among them were ghost workers or staff with no letters of appointment, retirees or sacked staff who were still drawing salaries several years after their retirement and lay-off as the case may be, staff with forged certificates, falsified ages and outstanding disciplinary cases and several others with various deficiencies, discrepancies and violations of rules of their engagement. A comprehensive list of their names was drawn up and submitted to ex-Governor Alao-Akala who apparently could not act on it since it was submitted in the twilight of his departure from office. Fighting a political battle to retain his office, Alao-Akala had no choice but to buckle at his feet in the implementation of the report he authored.After taking over, Governor Abiola Ajimobi was faced with two options over the matter: to boot out the indicted workers, thus sanitising the state civil service and relieve the state government of the unpleasant, parasitic burden of doling millions of naira in monthly salaries to ghost workers or retain them and continue to shell out millions of naira. The latter course also carries the added threat of corrupting the integrity of the state civil state, lowering the morale of and polluting the rank and file of conscientious and dutiful workers in the state.Moreover, such step would clearly be against the principles of equity and fair-play. Even in taking the hard and painful choice of a sack, the Oyo State Government tempered it with due process by allowing for a fair-hearing. A panel was constituted and the workers penciled down for the rationalization exercise were allowed to defend themselves. Names of those who were absolved and who had good cases were struck off the list and the remainders, about 3,000 in all, were shown the way out.Even after the sack, in response to clamorous claims of unjustifiable sack by the affected civil servants, an 11-man committee headed by the state Attorney-General and Commissioner for Justice, Adebayo Ojo had been set up. This panel has a representative of the Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC) and the Nigeria Bar Association as members.Actually, an unbiased post-mortem of the exercise the Oyo State Government carried out will reveal that there is nothing wrong in purging its workforce of the aforementioned categories of defective staff at this time. Corruption under whatever guise is like a cancer and when allowed to remain in a system, destroys every good part of the system. There is no how a government which wants to run an efficient civil service and take its state and its people to El Dorado in 2015 can continue to harbour these sets of staff in its employ. In point of fact, the Oyo State Government, all other state governments and the Federal Government, should probe further to uncover the sharp practices used in 'loading' payrolls in their departments, ministries, units and offices, especially in the rural areas and establish more stringent rules of engaging civil servants not only to deal with the general lax and laxity in the Nigerian Civil Service is noted and notorious for but to get value for the money being paid out as salaries to their workers.What the Oyo State Government has done therefore is most commendable so that when the state's IGR is boosted as planned, instead of going for settlement of ever-increasing ghost workers' salary bill, falsifiers of ages and certificates, the money would be used to execute projects, welfare facilities and firms for the betterment of the general civil populace in the state and provide employment for the jobless. More importantly, it is a morale-booster for righteousness and a hard knock for fraud and corruption which this society is trying to fight.Adebayo is a lecturer at the University of Ibadan.
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