. . .As about 20,000 civil servants face screening
Head of Civil Service in Katsina State, Alhaji Usman Isyaku, has said the state government will soon clean up its payroll, halt redundancy and effect reorganization exercise. Speaking in an interview with journalists, Isyaku hinted that the on going manpower audit and verification exercise in the state civil service had been tailored towards implementation of reforms in the state administration under Governor Dikko Umar Radda. He said the staff verification signposts the government’s commitment to determine the actual staff on its payroll, their actual contributions, various cadre, qualifications and ensure maximum utilization of the existing workforce.The HoS further affirmed the government’s commitment to carry out reorganization of the workforce in view of noticeable redundancy of many workers, saying: “One of the most important reasons for conducting this exercise is that we are going to determine where we have shortage of staff and where we have people who are redundant; doing nothing, so that we can easily move such people from point A to point B,” Isyaku also decried the leakages in the civil service payroll as a result of persons who continue to draw salaries after they or their relations had exited the state service before they reached retirement age.He explained: “You may find somebody on the payroll but he may be working elsewhere and his salary is still running. We have a very good system; it’s through data capture that you can enter our payroll but it’s only when you retires after 35 years in service or 60 years of age that it will shut you down.” But anything outside that, as in when somebody withdraws his services and is working with another organization or somebody dies along the line, his relations may not decide to report and his salary will continue running. “So, it’s easy for us to determine and remove them from payroll (through this manpower audit and verification exercise) and thereafter recruit others to fill in the vacancies.” The newly appointed Katsina HoS said the verification exercise is coming six years after similar one conducted in 2017 during the tenure of the immediate past administration when the bio – metric data of every employee of the state was captured.” The essence is to ensure maximum utilization of the existing workforce. And at the end of it, only those who are not working with the state government but are collecting salaries will be removed from the payroll,” he assured. # # # # # # # #