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From Adanna Nnamani, Abuja
Chairman of the Independent Corrupt Practices and Other Related Offences Commission (ICPC), Prof. Bolaji Owasanoye, has called on the Federal Government to re-balance the workforce, in order to realise a compensation system that is fair and aligns with productivity.
Owasanoye made the call at the opening ceremony of a two-day National Policy Forum on Compensation Management in Nigeria, under the auspices of the Michael Imoudu National Institute for Labour Studies (MINILS), in collaboration with the National Salaries, Incomes and Wages Commission (NSIWC) and the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung Foundation (FES), in Abuja, recently.
The ICPC boss said there was a need for fair compensation and collective bargaining while canvassing for productivity. He noted, regrettably, that the workforce, especially the public sector, was misaligned and groaning under the scourge of fake employment, ghost workers and wrong skill mix.
He said: “A number of anti-corruption initiatives have, overtime, pruned down the number of ghost workers, but the malady of fake employment is work in progress with ICPC, the Head of the Civil Service and the Federal Civil Service Commission working together to tackle this malady.”
He suggested re-distribution or re-alignment of public sector skills to meet the needs of the government and achieve higher productivity in the sector. He equally raised the issue of some critical sectors of government being under-resourced in human capital, while others have redundant surplus, thereby necessitating the right skill mix to be adopted urgently.
Earlier in his welcome address, Chairman of NSIWC, Mr. Ekpo Nta, said the forum was born out of an urgent need to put to rest the recurrent crisis with compensation in Nigeria.
Nta, who is the immediate past chairman of ICPC, commended the current leadership of the commission for the many recoveries it had made, especially in personnel cost of government, while encouraging participants to speak freely, as their opinions and suggestions would count at the end of the day.
In his own remarks, the Director-General of MINILS, Comrade Isa Aremu, stated that the turn-out at the event confirmed the validity of the saying that “the sum is greater than some of us.”
Aremu said the programme was timely coming at the break of a new political dispensation as “every political democracy required an economic democracy to succeed.”
He commended the federal government for not retrenching workers, despite economic crunch, high inflation, shortfall in revenue generation and other hardships brought about by the COVID 19 pandemic.
