We Are A Job-creating Government – El-rufai

7 years ago

We Are A Job-creating Government – El-rufai

Governor of Kaduna State, Malam Nasir El-Rufai recently fielded questions from reporters in Kaduna. He spoke on various issues ranging from challenges of governance to modest achievements he has recorded so far in office.

There is a lot of apprehension amongst civil servants that your public service reform programme is aimed at retrenching workers. Can you clarify what the reforms are all about?

People usually worry when you talk of public service reforms because of retrenchment and so on. I think if people have been very discerning as far as this government is concerned, we’ve been a job creating government, not a job destroying government. I think we are the only state in Nigeria that has hired 5,000 people in its first year in office. We also brought back 800 retired nurses because we have a shortage of nurses in the state. We brought them back to mentor the younger nurses. We have not retrenched since we came.

We have verified and removed ghost workers, but that is not retrenchment, that is removing those that don’t exist. Though we have added 5,000 people to the payroll, we still spend less on salaries and allowances than when we came into office. The purpose of this reform has nothing to do with retrenchment. We call it public service revitalisation programme.

The qualification of those in service is not commensurate with the level of education in Kaduna state. You see many people who joined the service after secondary school, they just attend one course and they convert when you have people with degrees and HNDs looking for work. One of the key objectives of the programme is this renewal. How do we inject new, young blood into the service.

How do we get new skills? You have confidential secretaries who are used to typewriter . Nobody uses typewriter any more. You need new skills. The world is changing, even education is evolving. Skills have disappeared, new ones are coming in, we have young people out there with these skills and they are not in the service. Bring them so that the skills that you have, match with the people of the right age. You revitalise the service, you make it better.

The way and manner public servants think needs to be restructured. We are called public servants, but we don’t behave like public servants. We behave like lords of the manor, we behave like masters. You need to take all various grades and cadre of the public service for a reorientation programme for them to understand that they exist to serve the people and not the other way round.

All these are the key components of the programme. We have no intention of retrenching any one; of course, some people will lose their jobs because some have fake certificates. Someone sent me the name of a person through Whatsapp with the photocopy of his degree certificate from Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, and said governor, it is fake, check.

I asked the commissioner for education to check, the certificate looks as good as my ABU certificate but it was fake.

They said the name has never registered in ABU. But he has a proper ABU certificate and NYSC discharge certificate and he is working in one of our agencies! So one of the things we are going to do as part of this reform is to cross check things like that as there are many people with certificates that are fake. If you find such a person are you going to leave him in the service ? There are people who have three birth dates.