By Sylvanus Viashima
JALINGO – Taraba State Governor Agbu Kefas on Wednesday said that his administration is focusing on repositioning the State Civil Service for greater impact through training and retraining of civil servants to align with contemporary realities.
Governor Agbu disclosed this in a statement issued in Jalingo and signed by Hon. Emmanuel Bello, SA to the Governor on Media and Digital Communication.
He said that the era of shuffling files and cabinets around and gossiping in offices is over and the transition to more advanced and digital operations requires a lot of trainings which his administration is determined to undertake.
“We are now in a digital era and it is only natural that we key into digitisation as a State. We can not help because it is our contemporary reality and the earlier we realise this, the better.
“As an administration, we came in with a blueprint to transform the state and put it on the pedestal of accelerated development. The civil service is instrumental to achieving these goals and so it means that we must train those civil servants to be able to key into this blueprint and okay their respective roles.
“These trainings will come in batches but I tell you we will not stop until we get results. Our aim is to have a harmonised system where transparency is enhanced and supervision is made easier. Already we have commenced the process of ensuring that civil servants report to work as and when due and do their work diligently. You can not achieve this with the analogue system of supervision that is in place presently.
“We are also working hard to ensure that effecting promotions is also automated such that once one is due for promotion, he automatically gets upgraded to the next level without unnecessary hassle. This will help to check instances of corruption where people sometimes bribe their way around to be promoted or where promotion is based on tribal and religious sentiments.
“I have made it clear to everyone that we are taking the welfare of workers very seriously and we would do that with the needed commitment. So far, we are working hard to make sure that the working environment itself is conducive enough for the people to be at their best.
“As part of motivation, we have put a machinery in place to ensure that backlog of pension and gratuities are cleared. This will assure those currently in service that retirement is not a death sentence but something to actually celebrate. This of course will eradicate the tendency of people forging documents just to continue in the service.
“So basically, we need a civil service that is positioned to actually work and deliver in this contemporary society. That requires training and retraining of the Civil Servants. That requires training of various categories of players in the system. That requires stepping down the trainings to get down to the last rums of the ladder. That is our goal” Governor Kefas maintained.
Our Correspondent reports that there have been series of trainings for staff of the state owned media organisations, various categories of civil servants as well as home based engineers in the maintenance of the tractors newly acquired by the State government for farmers.
