The Independent Corrupt Practices and Other Related Offences Commission, ICPC, has called on the Federal Government to re-balance the workforce in order to realize a compensation system that is fair and aligns with productivity.
Chairman of the Commission, Prof. Bolaji Owasanoye, made the call at the opening ceremony of a 2-day National Policy Forum on Compensation Management in Nigeria.
TheFact Daily reports that according to Prof. Owasanoye, there was need for fair compensation as well as collective bargaining while canvassing for productivity as “what has not been produced cannot be shared.”
He noted regrettably that the workforce especially the public sector was misaligned, and groaning under the scourge of fake employment, ghost workers and wrong skill mix.
“A number of anti-corruption initiatives have, overtime, pruned down the number of ghost workers, but the malady of fake employment is work in progress with the ICPC, the Head of the Civil Service and the Federal Civil Service Commission working together to tackle this malady”, he pointed out.
Owasanoye suggested re-distribution or re-alignment of public sector skills to meet the needs of government and achieve higher productivity in the sector. He equally raised the issue of some critical sectors of government being under-resourced in human capital while others have redundant surplus thereby necessitating the right skill mix to be adopted urgently.
“We need to resolve this kind of anomaly with this conversation, while we discuss compensation management, we must be honest to discuss the things that will facilitate and enable fair compensation,” he concluded.
Earlier in his welcome address, Chairman of the National Salaries, Income & Wages Commission, NSIWC, Mr. Ekpo Nta, said that the forum was born out of an urgent need to put to rest the re-occurring crisis with compensation in Nigeria.
“We have gone past the blame game, let us salvage our compensation policy as it is biting all over,” he said.
In his remarks, the Director-General of the Michael Imoudu National Institute for Labour Studies, MINILS, Comrade Isa Aremu, stated that the turn-out at the event confirmed the validity of the saying that “the sum is greater than some of us”.
He said the programme was timely coming at the break of a new political dispensation as “every political democracy required an economic democracy to succeed.”
He commended the Federal government for not retrenching workers despite economic crunch, high inflation, shortfall in revenue generation and other hardships brought about by the COVID -19 pandemic.
The National Policy Forum was organised under the auspices of the MINILS in collaboration with the NSIWC and the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung Foundation (FES).
