The Oyo State Government has laid off 662 workers for certificate forgery and removed 2,021 fictitious names from its payroll.
Soji Eniade, the Head of Service, told journalists in Ibadan that the dismissed workers were identified after a thorough verification exercise.
According to reports, the 662 affected workers include 305 from the local government service, 152 from MDAs and 149 from the Teaching Service Commission.
Twenty-eight others are from parastatals, 26 from higher institutions of learning and two from the State Universal Basic Education Board (SUBEB).
Mr. Eniade said the State Executive Council had, at its last meeting, discussed the need to restructure the civil and public service of the state in terms of quality and quantity.
“In terms of quantity, we want to have the right size or figure of civil and public servants in the state institutions, and our intention is to have institutions without ghost workers,” he said.
To achieve the objective, he said the state government re-engaged the services of a consultant who had earlier and excellently performed the same exercise in 2008.
He said the exercise was a normal organisational check aimed at improving the quality of service in the state.
“We cannot continue to allow the influx of people with fictitious certificates into the service of the state,” he said.
Mr Eniade, however, said they exempted the Primary School Certificate in the verification exercise.
“We only reckoned with West African Senior School Certificate (WASSCE), Ordinary National Diploma (OND), Higher National Diploma (HND), Degree certificates and other higher certificates,” he said.
Mr. Eniade said that with the utilisation of the Bank Verification Number (BVN), 2,021 fictitious names were identified on the state’s payroll.
“Out of the 2,021 identified through the BVN, 1,432 are pensioners from the state, 84 pensioners from the local government, while 505 are from other sectors of the service,” he said.
He said that the 2,021 fictitious names had been expunged from the payroll of the state.
