Alhaji Dabarako Mohammed is the Kwara State Head of Service. He reveals plans by the state government to extend biometric data capturing exercise to the Pensions Board in order to key into the contributory pension scheme and also introduce Magnetic Renaissance Imaging (MRI), a technology that foretells when a person will die.

In this interview with BISI ADEDAYO, he also speaks on government’s efforts at constructing a new state secretariat, providing housing scheme for workers, as well as reviewing the current salary structure, among other issues.

As the number one civil servant in the state, how has it been performing the role of intermediary between civil servants and government?

Naturally, that is how it should be and in that case, whatever the civil servants are asking for; it has to first of all come through me and I will do the analysis. I either agree with them and present their case to the government, or convince them to step it down. That is the way I do things and I maintain a good relationship between the two of them.

Then, what have been your major challenges in the course of carrying out these duties?

Normally, when you assign a duty, your expectation is that it should be carried out within a particular time frame, and done properly. We set a target, but achieving the target is a challenge. If the result is not back in 24 hours, I want to know the reason for it? These are challenges, but people are beginning to realise that we are target-driven. Not only that, we are also impact-driven. If you do a thing, are people happy for it? Are people really getting what they want as dividends of democracy? That is what I mean by impact-driven.

Kwara happens to be one of the first seven states that implemented the minimum wage, but there is this allegation of disparity among certain cadres of civil servants as far as implementation of the minimum wage is concerned. What is the government doing to address this?

Yes, most of the states began implementation of the N18,000 minimum wage on the August 1, 2011, and Kwara was one of them. In fact, we were even set before August. But surprisingly, some states have not even implemented it up till today. I learnt that about 11 states are yet to key into it because of funds. Coming back to your question, the labour discovered that gap in the wages of officers from Assistant Directors, Deputy Directors, Directors and the others was too high.

So, Labour observed that there was a need for us to adjust the wages of those between Grade Levels 07 and 14. I agreed with them but said, what we should understand is that Grade levels 15, 16 and 17 have domestic staff, which informed the difference. If you remove that, you will discover that the ratio will become normal. I think that is what they failed to realise, thus the clamour for another adjustment.

The moment I gave this explanation, Labour went round all the states where this salary scale were implemented fully and discovered that the difference was occasioned by their salaries of their domestic staff.

The other area they pleaded for a cut was in the tax regime, that it was too high. But we told them that the more you earn the more tax you pay to the government. As God would have it, this year, we sat down with the Board of Internal Revenue, responsible for giving us the table for charging and asked it to look into double taxation.

I think they did something which is pleasing to most civil servants in the state. So, around February/March this year, they realised that there was an increase. They even thought that was the wage increase. But no, it was in the area of taxation that we revisited and reduced drastically what people now pay as tax.  Many people were happy about it.

Recently, the State Civil Service Commission conducted promotional examinations and interview for certain cadres of civil servants, when is the result coming out?

Well, they are still on it and since it is a continuous exercise, as people go for promotional examination, the commission releases the results, and once this is done, the Ministry of Finance implements. The only thing we would want to put is to know what additional money is coming into play. Already, we know that the wage bill is very high on the part of government because we are taking between N2.2 billion and N2.5 billion from the federal allocation and what goes into salaries is about N1.4 billion, other wages are about N700 million. That gives a clear-cut recurrent of N2.1 billion which is very high and we need to construct roads and other infrastructures.

Last year, the state government carried out biometric data for its civil servants. But it appears that up till now, the government is yet to make public its findings?

It is going to be a continuous exercise because we do recruitment and people retire. We have gone beyond the issue of ‘ghost workers’ in the main service of the state which I directly supervise. I am only extending it to local government areas and encouraging parastatals to do same. Our target now is to extend the biometric to the pension board. So, we are now looking at a stage whereby we can collapse the two. You filled in your age from the date you enter the service and then we now check your first day of appointment.

By the time you are 35 in the service, or you are 60 years of age, it will automatically migrate to the pension board. That is our focus at the moment and by the time we get to that level, you know so many things will clean up. The only challenge we are facing now is how to know when a civil servant dies on time, because, we at times don’t get to know early enough.

There are some deficiencies you should be expecting. But, by God’s grace, we would be there and by the time we are there, you know we now have the Magnetic Renaissance Imaging machine (MRI) that can tell when a particular person would die. These are the kind of things that we want to put in place. It is not intended to say we want to remove people anyhow, but just to sanitise the system.

You did mention that the state has overcome the proliferation of the service with ghost workers. Are you saying that the state doesn’t have any at the moment?

Yes, in the main service. You know when we say Head of Service, it is not only meant for the main service, but we start somewhere. We started in the main service in since 2008. We brought up the files and input them into the system. Where we had similar names, we called people and merged files. If you are taking two salaries, we have decided not to punish where we got people. If you are taking two salaries, we stop one. If you are the person that owns the other name, you will come and explain. If otherwise, you will be afraid to come to the Head of Service because once we detect, I will tell my people raise AVP variation for pay. Once that is done, the letter will be forwarded to the Ministry of Finance. The Ministry will in turn, stop that person and the one that you are entitled to will be coming to you.

Is the state planning to key into the contributory pension scheme?

We are very much on it. We started discussion long ago. We had planned to jump into contributory pension scheme because I took special interest in it. Special interest in the sense that I pushed it to the former governor, Dr. Bukola Saraki, we discussed it at the executive council meeting and he bought the idea. Then, I discovered some little problems along the line, which we had to clear from the Head of Service of the Federation.

We discovered was that if we migrate from the current pension system to the new one, by the time you contribute, maybe, N10million, both from employee and employer. By the time you are leaving the service, the money would be divided into two, which is N5 million as your gratuity.

The remaining portion would be spread over the next 10-12 years because the insurance covers just 10 years. That is what you will be taking every month, meaning that at the end of 10 years, you won’t have anything again.

For the fact that retired civil servants are now being paid, they are now healthier than before. Most people are now living beyond the age of 70 years. If you go to the Pensions Board, you will see people, 60, 70 years of age. In fact, I was checking records about three days ago and I saw two people that have exceeded 100 years of age in the state as retried civil servants. So, if you now migrate to contributory pension, what happens to somebody between the ages of 70 and 101 years? That means they won’t take anything. I led a team to Abuja and we discussed with them and then when we reached the National Council on Establishments, I also raised the issue.

The council raised a committee and made me its chairman. We agreed that the employer should contribute additional two per cent which will be called security life contribution so that by the time you reach the age of 70 years, if your PFA is paying you N25,000, they will continue to pay you that amount. We discovered this and said when we returned to our own state, we would include it.

Before that, we had sent a letter to the governor, who in turn, sent it to the State House of Assembly. We’ll educate them on it whenever we hold the stakeholders’ meeting, so that they can now include it as part of the bill, and even if we leave government, at least the next government will be able to know that yes, this is where they will start. The other issue we discovered is that at the National Council on Establishments, once someone becomes a Permanent Secretary or Head of Service, the State should take the liability. By the time they call stakeholders’ meeting, we will let them know. Another thing that is making us slow down is the fact that the Senate is also trying to do something.

The issue of welfare, training and retraining of civil servants is very germane to effective and efficient service delivery. What is the government doing in this direction?

The issue of welfare of civil servants can be looked at from various perspectives. We have discussed salary and we also talked of bringing down taxation a little bit. That is also part of welfare package. The other area is to make the offices comfortable for civil servants to work. You will see that in 2009, there was one retreat that we organized and the outcome of that retreat is still part of what we remodelled into the one organized by this current government that came up with a document called MTSS, which is Medium Term Strategy Programme for the government. Part of it is the infrastructural rehabilitation which includes renovation of Ministry of Commerce and Cooperatives, part of Ministry of Health, Ministry of Housing and Local Government Service Commission, among others.

Formerly, if you go to the State Secretariat, the place was deteriorating before the last administration brought it up. The other area of touching the lives of civil servants has to do with the training and retraining. What I did was to first of all allow the civil servants working around me to undergo the training and subsequently, those in other Ministries, which has now paid off. We also tried to revive our Annual Service Week, which was very successful. Besides, we discovered that the pace at which people were still moving was slow. To them it was fast, but the rate at which I was getting feedback was not as high as I wanted it. We now came up with the idea of allowing the Permanent Secretaries to be meeting every two weeks. This one is hidden, not everybody knows, but it has been very effective and impacting.

Is the state government thinking along the line of salary restructuring and of course, embarking on the construction of Phase II State Secretariat?

The issue of salary restructuring to civil servants are being worked out. We are always talking to the Federal Government, particularly on the formula for salary distribution. We want the Federal Government to change it in favour of both the states and local governments. If they change it in our favour, you know we will have more money and if we have more money, why can’t we pay? As I told you, both Internally Generated Revenue (IGR) and the federal allocation if put together, call it N3 billion per month, and you are spending N2.1billion/N2.2billion on the recurrent, how much do you have left for development? These are some of the things that are disturbing us currently from increasing the salary of workers but we will do it. Then, in the area of building more secretariats, we have a plot that we wanted to build since 2009 but because of finances, we have not been able to achieve that. That notwithstanding, it is the intention of this present government to clean up the Ministry of Water Resources, Ministry of Energy, Board of Internal Revenue and put up new structures like Ministry of Finance and Environment in that axis. By the time we have three of that I think our problems with the ministries in that axis will be limited.

What about housing scheme for civil servants?

Foremost, we have old structures built since the colonial period. All the people living there were asked to purchase them. We have about 89 of such buildings where civil servants are staying. In fact, they have started paying. By the end of this month, they should finish payment. Again, other consultants came to me and said they wanted to build houses for civil servants. My concern is on the amount that they want to charge per flat. It is the repayment that I do consider because when you are calculating, you base it on your current salary before you venture into it.  If you tell a civil servant to come and take a house for N5million and you tell him to pay in less than 10 years, that is abnormal. So, I told those people to go and look at their finances again and see that they can deliver houses to us and be able to spread that N5million to 15 or 20 years. If they can do that, then, we would be able to pay.

Our own Housing Corporation too, I told them to look for people to build houses of N2million to N3million so that we can sell to people. They too requested for guarantee and I told them I can buy 1, 000 houses and distribute to 1, 000 civil servants. We want to discuss with the Federal Mortgage Bank and the only thing between us is the PMI that they introduced into the system. It has been there like that. That is Primary Mortgage Institution that will come in between the civil servants and the bank. The PMI have certain conditions that we are still discussing. By the time I put all those ones together, I am sure we would get more houses. I would also want a situation whereby our partners can extend the initiative to local government areas, so that civil servants can choose where they want their house built such that after their retirement, they can have somewhere to settle.

You are the Chairman, State Flood Disaster Relief and Rehabilitation Committee, how have you been serving in that capacity?

National Emergency Management Agency (NEMA) warned that 2013 would be worse than 2012 in terms of flooding. What we did was to identify some sites that in case there is flood, these are the places people will move to in Patigi, Edu, Kaiama and Moro local government areas of the state. People should be able to relocate to all those areas in case there is flood. Secondly, the intention of government is that if people respond, we would go and put tents in certain areas but what is even worrisome to us today is that if people decide to relocate to the upland areas, government will have to build schools, hospitals and other infrastructures that will attract the younger ones if the old ones say they can’t leave riverside areas. The second plan is to negotiate with the authorities at Jebba and Kainji dams that they should also talk to Shiroro Dam authorities so that if the dams are getting filled up to about 90 per cent, they should be discharge them. They should not be allowed to reach 100 per cent that can cause damage downstream. That will also sensitize the people downstream that the water is increasing and they will be able to take care of their property. Also, there is one beauty with the current Asa River de-silting. The river will now flow on its path and you will hardly see it overflow its banks again.