The Office of the Head of Service of the Federation said Monday, that 446,002 federal ministries, departments and agencies, MDAs, workers, were captured under the Integrated Personnel and Payroll Information System, IPPIS.
Acting Head of Civil Service of the Federation (HOCSF), Mrs. Folashade Yemi-Esan, stated this yesterday at a budget defence session with the House of Representatives committee on public service matters.
Recall that President Muhammadu Buhari had during the presentation of the 2020 budget proposal before a joint session of the National Assembly announced that as from end of October, any staff not captured in the IPPIS will not be paid salary.
Yemi-Esan informed that out of the 446,002 federal staff captured in the IPPIS, 77,651 are from the core civil service while 368,351 are from the public service.
According to her, “there are people that have been employed but are yet to be documented. We received a number of letters of recruitment and as they come into the Office of the Head of Service, we compile the names and send back to the Civil Service; because we have discovered that a lot of them come with fake letters of employment”
She told the Committee that the HOS has decided to earmark N2 million for the printing of promotion letters in the 2020 budget explaining that the promotion letters will be with security features it was to forestall incidences of fake letters.
“We discovered that before now, people just type promotion letters and take it to the ministries- these are people who are not even staff. The amount (N2m) is not even enough because we need to include some security features.
“The Civil Service Commission employs and the Head of Service does documentation. However, for Grades level 01-06, the Head of Service is allowed to employ.
She stated that the government is focusing on the implementation of the civil 2017-2020 civil service strategic plan, which entails repositioning the service through training and retraining adding that 1,500 staff have so far been trained out of the about 80,000 that are due to benefit from the training.
“What we are focusing on is the implementation of the strategic plan; for example, we have done the training of only 1,500 staff. Meanwhile, we have about 80,000 civil servants that should be trained”, she stated.
On the 2020 budget, the head of service stated that they are proposing to spend N2.2 billion on personnel cost and N1.7 billion on overhead leaving total recurrent at N4 billion, while capital is N893 million.
Also, presenting the 2020 budget proposal to the committee, executive secretary of the Federal Government Staff Housing Loans Board, Mrs. Hannatu Fika said although they requested for N8.728 billion, only N5 billion was approved by the ministry of finance, budget and national planning lamenting that it was grossly inadequate.
She stated that the Federal Capital Territory Administration (FCTA) has allocated a parcel of land to the loans board in Wassa District of the FCT, which they intend to build 292 housing units of two and three bedroom flats for civil servants.
Chairman of the committee, Sani Bala (APC-Kano), and his colleagues in commenting on the budget, congratulated Mrs. Yemi-Esan on her appointment and urged her to discharge her duties in the most transparent manner and minimize waste.
The committee subsequently approved the budget after the Head of Service entertained questions from some committee members.
