GOVERNOR Abdulfatah Ahmed of Kwara State has threatened to sanction any of his commissioners found to have smuggled job applicants into the state civil service outside the beneficiaries of Kwara State Bridge Employment Scheme (KWABES).

Speaking with beneficiaries of the scheme in Ilorin, on Thursday, the governor said the scheme was established to gradually absorb youths in the scheme into the private and public sectors in the state.

 Governor Ahmed, who explained that the KWABES programme was meant to guide youths from unemployment to employment, said it was also meant to open youths to opportunities that would make them not to rely solely on government.

“This, among others, is the kind of thinking we want to put into our people through micro-credit loans via bankable proposal,” he said.

 Governor Ahmed, who said the government spends N2.6 billion on salaries and wages every month out of its N2.9 billion monthly allocation, added that all the participants could not be absorbed into the service, while assuring that the participants would be absorbed in due course from any opening in the civil service.

 “In 2013, the total amount of money that entered Kwara State from federation allocation was about N38 billion. For the same period, N468billion entered Akwa Ibom State. You can see the difference just because Akwa Ibom is an oil producing state.

“So, we must understand so that we can look at the efforts that we are putting in to improve on people’s lives. We are one of the six states that have been paying salaries consistently in the last 10 years. We have been paying our pensioners up to date and we don’t have any abandoned project in Kwara State.  

 “Kwara State has been very lucky since the time of Bukola Saraki. The reason is because we were able to sit down and look at how much we have, what we can do with what we have,” he said.