2 arrested over impersonation

The Ekiti State Police Command has arrested two persons, Samuel Omotade, 27, and Akinbode Fatade, 28, for impersonation at the on-going biometric validation of all civil servants and pensioners in the state.

The two men were identified by staff of the Ekiti State Ministry of Finance as impersonators at the Ekiti State Data Centre and handed over to the police.

Omotade confessed he had been impersonating his father, who died aged 56, since 2012 at the Aramoko Local Government, while Fatade said he had been representing his “ailing” 60-yearold father at St. Paul’s Anglican Primary School, Oke-Mesi since 2018.

According to Omotade, who said he lives in Ibadan, Oyo State, but has been receiving prompt payment of his father’s salary for many months via electronic transfer as he works as a security guard at the Aramoko-Ekiti Local Government Council office.

He added that a senior staff of the local office government had been assisting him in the act.

Also, Fatade said that the headmaster of a primary school in Oke-Mesi had been assisting him “to work in place of my father who has been absent from work for months.”

The Commissioner for Finance, Ekiti State, Mr Dapo Kolawole, said the government has taken a step further in ensuring accountability and transparency in the civil service system by introducing the biometric validation exercise to keep accurate data of all civil servants and pensioners in the state. He said the step has helped in curbing the excesses of civil servants in the state.

“When death occurs in the civil service, a declaration is made to announce vacancy to fill up the space to avoid cases like impersonation. Through the biometric exercise, the fingerprints of

these suspects did not match with those of their parents that they impersonated.

“When we commenced the biometric exercise at the local government levels, some civil servants were not verified because they were not in attendance and so we invited them to the Data Centre for verification, where we discovered some of them have issues of impersonation and substitution,” Kolawole said.

The Commissioner described the act as “illegal and fraudulent”, while declaring that government would ensure the system was purged of all forms of illegalities.