2nd October, 2012
GBENRO ADESINA/IBADAN
Oyo state Governor, Abiola Ajimobi, has approved the recall of 1,499 workers out of the 3,000 civil servants earlier relieved of their jobs.
The workers were sacked for various reasons such as presenting forged academic certificates, giving false age and personal data, having outstanding disciplinary cases against them and those categorised as non-existing staff, also known as ghost workers.
The decision to reinstate the workers was taken Tuesday at the weekly state executive council meeting held in Ibadan, the Oyo state capital, southwest Nigeria.
This was sequel to the recommendations of the panel constituted by Governor Ajimobi to review the cases of the affected workers.
Workers to be recalled, according to the Special Adviser on Media to the governor, Dr. Festus Adedayo, would be paid their salaries during the period they were laid off.
The 13-member panel, headed by the state Attorney-General and Commissioner for Justice, Mr. Adebayo Ojo, recommended that some of those who allegedly falsified their ages should be reinstated.
The immediate past government in the state had engaged the services of a consultant, Captain Consulting, to do a thorough audit of the workers in the state, with the latter using certain criteria for determining those who had falsified their ages.
One of the criteria used by the firm was the assumption that most of the workers ought to have been pupils in primary schools in the 1960s and 1970s, with a minimum age of 6 years and would have sat for the Primary School Leaving Certificate at the age of 12 years, among other considerations.
But the Ajimobi panel observed that some of the children of educated parents or brilliant ones of indigent parents often enjoyed double promotion in their academic progress.
Besides, it also noted that some pupils in 1960s and 1970s got enrolled to start school at ages 4 and 5.
The panel also based its recommendations on the appeal by the governor that the panel should be very liberal, considerate and humane in the discharge of its assignment and Ajimobi’s charge that it should work in accordance with the well-known legal maxim that “it is better to set free a thousand guilty persons than to convict an innocent man”.
According to the panel, as much as the government wanted to begin the reform of the public service, it would be difficult, if not impossible, to prove charges of age falsification against the affected workers.
Also, it was discovered by the review panel that most of the workers, by the time they were collecting their testimonials from their various schools, were not mature enough to discover the discrepancies between their real ages and the ones written on their testimonials.
The government also based its decision to recall some of the sacked workers on appeals from a cross section of well meaning individuals, both within and outside the state.
Governor Ajimobi had justified the sack of the workers on the need to reform the state public service which he said was riddled with inefficiency and corruption.