The office of the Establishment Secretary has issued notices to some 622 civil servants who have attained the mandatory retirement age of 60 years across the board to proceed on retirement.
The Establishment Secretary Dr. Julius Sandy stated that, he has already signed and issued the letters to the 622, with a list of the retiring officers indicating their end dates being forwarded to the office of the Accountant General on a weekly basis for deletion from the government pay roll.
All officers due retirement he noted, would have been issued valedictory letters on or before June 2008, but because of the scarcity of skilled labour, they might have to extend the services of those who possess critical skills. On the issue of invalidation, Dr. Sandy revealed that, there are excesses in the civil service, but efforts were underway to undertake a thorough coordinated verification exercise to dispense with excess labour.
As he put it “some offices have two vehicles with six drivers and six mates which no responsible institution can maintain.”
He further explained that, there are a little over seventy thousand (70,597) public servants on government payroll, with a monthly wage bill of over 18 billion leones (Le 18,013,074,635.00.) of which 16,654 or 20.6% are civil servants with a monthly wage bill of 3.6 billion leones (Le 3,658,996,016) or 20.3% of the entire wage bill.
77.2% of the above work force he added, are in the low cadre of grade 1-4 with little or no skill at all that might add value to the Civil Service. Grades 5 and 6 also in the lower cadre constitute 86.2%, which are either largely unskilled or simply have no skill. Grades 11 to 14 of the Civil Service where labour is expected to be highly skilled he disclosed merely constitute 1.2% of the entire work force.
“Over the years, training in the civil service has been fragmented, haphazard, uncoordinated, un-purposeful and therefore largely unproductive” he opined.
He however concluded that, his office has prepared a draft training policy, which would be presented to cabinet for approval so as to improve on the capacity of the civil service.
By Solomon Rogers
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