No fewer than 8,500 persons Illegally employed into the Delta State Civil Service in 2015 have been uncovered by the state government, including 2,000 others parading falsified credentials.
DAILY POST exclusively gathered that they were alleged to have been employed by some aides to the immediate past governor of the state, Dr Emmanuel Uduaghan, after allegedly collecting between N200,000 to N300,000 from the unsuspecting job seekers, while the female ones were allegedly sexually exploited before they were given the job.
But Sunny Areh, former aide to Uduaghan, in swift reaction, described the allegations as untrue, adding that “no aide collected money from anyone or job seekers. There was also no sexual intercourse before giving out jobs to female job seekers. Well since there is review, it’s settled”.
But the state Head of Service, (HOS), Mr Reginald Bayoko, in a statement issued and signed, a copy of which was made available to newsmen in Asaba, confirmed that the Okowa-led administration had ordered a review of the cases of the sacked workers.
He stated that the state governor, Dr Ifeanyi Okowa also approved the commencement of a screening exercise to review cases of the sacked 8,500 workers, adding that the 2,000 with falsified credentials have been handed over to the police for prosecution.
Part of the statement reads: “the screening exercise which is to be handled by a 9 man committee is expected to be concluded within three weeks, the action of the government was in defence to the public concerns regarding the fate of the candidates who might have genuine cases, the continuous exit of staff in the civil service due to retirement and the apparent incremental improvement in the state economy”.
“In fulfillment of Governor Ifeanyi Okowa’s earlier promise to revisit the 2015 recruitment exercise which was full of irregularities, the screening committee is to determine the number/nomenclature of advertised posts that were filled, to screen the candidates, specifying those considered eligible and those not eligible for each of the advertised posts, to ascertain the number and geographical spread of applicants/ candidates and their local government of origin, to make appropriate recommendations to government on the number of candidates and categories to be absorbed from those found eligible, to recommend measures to avoid future occurrences of irregularities in the recruitment process”.
Bayoko also disclosed that many of the sacked workers were discovered to have falsified their local government area of origin, especially Onitsha indigenes who claimed to have hailed from Oko community near Onitsha, adding that they all formed part of irregularities in the 2015 exercise.
