By Suleiman Anyalewechi
The Abia State Government has rejected claims that it has embarked on an another round of verification exercise of the state’s workforce.
It insisted that its directives for workers to upload their personal details online is only meant to avail itself of adequate information needed for appointments and promotions exercise within the civil service.
The Source reports that controversy, condemnation and outright rejection had trailed and continued to dog an earlier directives from the office of the State’s Head of Service last week for workers to submit themselves to online verification exercise effective from May 10 to May 31.
The directive instantly drew the ire of not a few workers ,with their umbrella body, the Nigerian Labour Congress, NLC, Abia State Chapter calling its members at the Ministries, MDAs and 17 Local Councils of the State to shun the proposed exercise.
The verification directives also had drawn flakes from the wider society ,with the opposition Peoples Democratic Party PDP describing it as dehumanizing and smacking of gross insensitive to the plight of the workers amidst the biting economic situation in the country.
But rising from its Executive Council meeting on Monday May 13 ,the Abia State Government expressed surprise that the NLC could make wrong imputations in to its well intentioned directive for workers to provide their personal resume for administrative purposes.
The State Commissioner of Information, Prince Okey Kalu, while addressing the Media after an Executive Council meeting presided over by Governor Alex Otti, said what the Government has called for is only the uploading of credentials and not a full scale verification, as alleged by the Abia NLC leadership.
“Government is not embarking on any verification ,rather what is going on is that workers have been asked to upload their credentials online.
“And like they say, there is no smoke without fire. The Government had planned to make certain appointments from within the civil service and when the files of senior civil servants were brought forward ,it was discovered that there were no papers ( necessary documents )in those files. There were questions as regards the credentials with which these civil servants have been working with .
“On what basis were they employed ? On what basis have they been promoted over the years ? Questions and more questions.
“It got to the point that the State Government decided on a Show-your-credentials exercise. But just to make it easy for workers, ,so that nobody congregates to do all that ,the Government directed that the upload of the credentials be carried out online.
“So that is not a verification exercise.But suffice it to say that asking workers not to embark on that exercise without interfacing and finding out what exactly is the issue is not fair to the state Government.
“Recall too that over the weekend,the NULGE Secretary issued a letter to that effect ( that local government workers should not adhere to the Government directives) .
“So we are using this opportunity to disabuse the minds of civil servants and members of the public who may have been misled by the false alarm and wrong narrative by the Abia state Chapter of NLC “the information Commissioner stated .
“Further speaking, Prince Kalu ,also described as unfair ,the decision by the Abia state Chapter of the National Union Pensioners NUP to deny entering in to an agreement with the State Government over the modalities for the recently paid pensions arrears in the state .
“The NUP Abia Chapter at the weekend issued a statement to the effect that their Executives did not represent them well during the discussions and subsequent agreement that led to the payments of their outstanding pensions in the state.
“It is not funny that the complaint is coming after the pensioners had received payments for their pensions .They embarked on a unilateral action and decided to write a public letter to the Government without first seeking clarifications from the Government officials concerned .
“That is not the right way to go about it.Not with a Government that means well for workers .A Government that has paid Abia pensioners their outstanding pensions with some dating back to 2014 .A Government that promised to pay pensioners their full monthly pensions going forward and has fulfilled that promise in the month of April and is poised to sustain the payments going forward..
“A Government that has come to your rescue after being owed several years of pensions . That is not the way to show gratitude” Prince Kalu noted
