PRESIDENT Muhammadu Buhari has directed that salaries of workers in all Ministries, Departments and Agencies that are yet to enrol in the Integrated Personnel Payroll Information System (IPPIS) should be stopped effective from 31st October 2019.
Acting Head of Civil Service of the Federation, Dr Folashade Yemi-Esan, made this known on Monday in Abuja at a workshop organised by the Chartered Institute of Personnel Management in collaboration with her Office.
She vowed to enforce the directive, saying any MDAs that wants their salaries should enrol before the October 31 deadline.
The Acting Head of Service noted that IPPIS is a very key tool that the current administration is using to ensure that the payroll is perfected. She noted that IPPIS has helped the government eliminate ghost workers and address the challenges of delay in payment of salaries by some agencies.
She said: “Like Mr President himself has directed that by the end of October, any of the MDAs that are not enrolled will not receive salaries any more. That is the implication as simple as that.
“If you want your salaries, you enrol but if you don’t want then you stay back.
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“The civil servants must trust that whatever reforms put in place, is for the good of the civil servants and the system. For us, if there is a change, it is supposed to catapult us forward and the resistance to slow the process down.
She urged civil service to embrace change and key into it the ongoing reforms in the public service designed to ensure efficient and effective service delivery to Nigeria.
She insisted that President Buhari has the interest of workers at heart, stressing that this was why he initiated the process of negotiation and eventual signing into law the new N30,000 minimum wage in the country.
Yemi-Esan said one of the key drivers of the new minimum wage negotiation was the realization that “this present government Mr President, in particular, is concerned about the welfare of public servants. And that was what drove through the negotiation.
“Thank God the negotiation went very because the unions understood the premise,” she said.
Former Nigerian High Commissioner to the United Kingdom, Christopher Kolade, in his key presentation at the event, lamented the poor quality of governance in the country.
He said: “Why has partisan politics become such a consuming activity for us, while our attention to governance is of such poor quality?
“After all, we know that politics is only the means of moving ourselves to the achievement of good governance, but consider some incidents that have actually occurred on our political terrain.
“Some politicians appear to be so determined to attain public office that they are ready to kill in order to get there! Elections are supposed to give us people that desire to render service – selfless public service – to the fatherland, but we make no provision for testing the capability of the candidate to produce
results of the right quality; rather, we behave as if we are trying to open the door to preferential advantage to the ones we elect.
“For this reason, we no longer seem to care about the responsibility of office, we are interested only in
the opportunity to capture access to public assets and resources.
“Surely, we know that this is not the way to become a top-twenty nation in the world! We must remember that public service will be delivered successfully only by people who sincerely regard themselves as public servants,” he said.
The diplomat insisted that public service agents in Nigeria should be leaders rather than rulers.
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