Welcome aboard OJ

There is this aphorism in Human Resource Management that everybody is equal to his job. What this means is that if you employ a Driver and make him a Manager, one of two things will happen to the job. Either he will bring the office of Manager to his level as a Driver or he will rise from his level as a Driver and become a Manager. In practical terms it is easier for the former to happen so in most cases this is what happens.

A classic example of a Driver bringing the Manager’s job to his level is what happened to the Bayelsa State Civil Service in the last six years. The leadership of the State Civil Service was so inefficient and notoriously corrupt that the Office operated like an auctioneer at work. Everything was available to anybody if you had the asking price either in cash or in kind. Records could be accessed and changed at will. During the recently concluded Biometrics exercise it is reported that 4000 ghost workers were discovered but what nobody is saying is that more than 5000 people also found jobs dating back to 2004!

It is against this background that MatrinexPolls welcomes Rev. O.J. Oworibo to the beat as the Head of the Civil Service of Bayelsa State. Even though he is allegedly a cousin of the Governor from the same Okpoma community, that does not take anything away from the fact that Rev. Oworibo is a seasoned bureaucrat having served in several capacities in the State Civil Service. He is the most exposed, travelled and experienced of all the available Permanent Secretaries!

The task of restoring credibility to the State Civil Service after several years of high level corruption and decadence is, to say the least, daunting. First and foremost Bayelsans would like to know the exact number of workers who should be on the Government’s payroll. A situation where a State less than a fifth the size of Delta State pays nearly the same wage bill monthly is unacceptable. The last Biometrics exercise was a waste of taxpayers’ money because it did not solve the problem. If anything, it created more problems because while the exercise lasted, the top echelon of the Civil Service seized the opportunity to recruit more workers. Fresh letters of employment backdated to 2004 or earlier were openly on sale for anything between N10,000.00 to N30,000.00. It was therefore a case of one out, two in. The spectre of goal-post shifting when it comes to retirements should be stamped out. People should retire as and when due – with dignity! Training and re-training of Civil Servants should no longer be treated with levity as happened with the IT training where everybody was “trained” but nobody was taught.

So welcome aboard Rev. O.J. Oworibo. A new broom, they say, sweeps clean so everybody is watching to see what will happen in the next 30 days hoping that it is not a case of more of the same.

Tata, everybody

Napoleon