KOGI, JANUARY 8, 2018 – Kogi State Government says it has uncovered 1667 fresh cases of certificates forgery involving its civil servants.
Addressing newsmen in Lokoja over the weekend, the Director-General on Media and Publicity to the Governor, Kingsley Fanwo, said the discovery was part of the ongoing Civil Service Reforms in the state.
According to him, the state has been paying hundreds of millions to workers who were employed with fake certificates on monthly basis, saying culprits are the real enemies of the state.
“For this category alone, the government has been paying over N113,360,000 monthly and over N1.3bn naira annually as salaries. This is enough to put drugs in all the PHC centres across the state to help our citizens,” Fanwo said.
According to him,”It is sad to note that civil servants will just print fake results to cheat on their state. These are the people criticizing the State Government for not paying salaries. We cannot continue to reward fraud. Genuine civil servants will continue to receive their salaries.
“The Civil Service Reforms is inevitable. The rot in the service was partly responsible for the backwardness of our dear state.
“Those who forged certificates to gain employment were unfair to our youths who have genuine certificates but no spaces to fill in the service. At the end of the ongoing verification, we hope to create spaces in the civil services for youths who possess the requisite skills and qualifications to serve the people of the state.”
Fanwo said the campaign of calumny against the Government of Kogi State was sponsored by “the fraudulent people exposed by the painstaking efforts of government at sanitizing the service”.
He said more reports are still being expected from various institutions of learning across the country, insisting that all “bad eggs will be removed from the service”.
“We are expecting more reports from other citadels of learning across the country. The electronic register has come to stay in the service”, he said.
