- FG Considers Fresh Measures to Check Illegal Recruitment
The Federal Government is considering a bouquet of new measures to check the increasing rate of illegal recruitment among the ministries, departments and agencies of government.
The measures to be rolled out soon, it was learnt, would put to an end the practice by the agencies of government of conducting recruitment without recourse to the laid down procedures.
Many government parastatals including the Central Bank of Nigeria, the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation, the Federal Inland Revenue Service, and the Nigerian Prisons Service, among others have been rocked by recruitment scandals.
Following a review carried out by the Ministry of Finance, 183 out of 185 MDAs had recruited 13,780 workers in recent years.
Out of the number, 6,917 workers were recruited without any formal approval; 2,314 were employed by seven universities with governing council approval; while only 4,549 had correctly obtained approval from the Office of the Head of Service and Federal Character Commission.
The review showed that out of the 185 agencies, only the Nigeria Police Force and the Nigerian Army sought approval for their recruitment.
But speaking on the development, the Finance of Finance, Mrs. Kemi Adeosun, said that the MDAs were not allowed to conduct any form of fresh recruitment without obtaining a prior written approval from the Budget Office of the Federation.
She said that the rate at which government agencies conducted such recruitment was worrisome, adding that it was responsible for the many cases of ghost workers in the public sector.
She said, “What we’ve found out is that many agencies have gone ahead to recruit illegally.”
“We are going to be very strict on agencies as this is where the ghost workers are created because those employed do not have any job specification. This government is very determined to stamp that out. There would be some measures to be rolled out to address that.”
