Dickson: Busting a multi-billion Naira payroll syndicate
When taking over the baton of leadership in Bayelsa in 2012, the Governor of Bayelsa, State, Mr. Henry Seriake Dickson, promised the citizenry a meticulous adherence to effective management of the resources of the state. He was firm in his declaration that the Restoration Administration would have no place for profligacy and a simmering culture of waste in the state.
Governor Dickson was fired by a compelling desire to introduce reforms to reposition a civil service that was in custody of a seemingly ineradicable rot and widespread fraud. He was worried and genuinely too that Bayelsa state which is rated the least populated in the country has the largest civil service after Lagos and Kano! The governor opted to take the uncomfortable path to confront a thriving industry of fraud perpetrated by a network of syndicates that specialize in bleeding the state of huge amount of resources that should have gone into project execution.
Two years of sustained hard work engendered by a painstaking implementation of the ongoing reforms and verification exercises introduced by the governor, have yielded some results. The total wage of bill of the state which was put at over N5 billion and N1.7 billion in the eight local government areas in 2012 have been drastically reduced to about N4 billion including salaries of political appointees. Dickson also disclosed in a meeting of the State Executive Committee in November last year that Bayelsa was losing N1 billion per month to the payroll syndicate in the state.
With the emergent discovery of large scale fraud involving billions of state funds, the panel being coordinated by the Deputy Governor of the State, Gboribiogha Jonah, took the first major step to withhold the salaries of 4,204 suspected fraudsters from the payroll in November, 2017. The withheld salaries were paid into the Unpaid Salaries Account. Those affected include 1,329 local government employees, 2184 from the Primary School Education System and 707 from the pension payroll. However, the government constituted a judicial commission of inquiry under the leadership of Justice Doris Adokeme to hear complaints emanating from the implementation of the reforms as a deliberate bid to prevent the punishment of innocent workers.
Yet, no less worrisome the preliminary report by the State Government Committee on Civil Service Reforms in February, 2018 that over 8000 civil servants got their appointments through an illegal system of inheritance in the state. The names of the affected workers were smuggled into the payroll as replacement for their friends, parents and relatives who retired from the service. The panel also is uncovered 500 administration officers in one local government area, (Sagbama) and 5000 nonacademic staff in the Niger Delta University and the other five state owned tertiary institutions in Bayelsa.
One critical outcome of the implementation of the ongoing reforms is the deployment of redundant workers to other agencies of government where they would have the opportunity to make input to the development of the state. For instance, the Bayelsa Transport Company maintains hundreds of drivers and other workers even when the company has no vehicles. The government is also using the platform of the reforms to review the workforce in the educational institutions in the state. Dickson holds the view that the current arrangements where over 70 percent of the staff strength of 15,433 workers in the school are non-academic staff most of who are redundant cannot be said to be productive.
As, it is, with all genuine reforms, there have been complaints and indeed outright blackmail orchestrated by the well-organized payroll syndicate to demonize the reforms. However, to the citizens of Bayelsa, the figures emanating from the reform panels emits a breath of fresh air as they signal a drastic reduction of the state’s over bloated payroll.
Fidelis Soriwei is Special Adviser, Media Relations to the Governor of Bayelsa State.