On Tuesday, federal civil servants protested the removal of over 17,000 workers from the federal government’s monthly payroll via the Integrated Payroll and Personnel Information System (IPPIS).

It was reported that the federal government delisted over 17,000 government employees from the IPPIS platform for failing to comply with five-year verification exercises.

However, in an address to journalists in Abuja, civil servants affiliated with the Association of Senior Civil Servants of Nigeria (ASCSN) claimed some flaws in the IPPIS verification process.

Comrade Tommy Etim Okon, President of ASCSN, told reporters that the portal contained the names of Personal Assistants (PAs), Special Advisers (SAs), and, in some cases, Ministers who had served in previous governments.

While urging workers to remain calm because steps were being taken to address the situation, Okon also chastised his colleagues, questioning why most genuine civil servants pretended to be unaware of the verification exercise while it was ongoing.

However, he noted that the Federation’s Office of the Head of Service has given affected employees who were incorrectly omitted from the IPPIS portal one week to forward their documents for update, provided they had genuine cases.

He said;

We called your attention to what we heard or information at our disposal just few days ago, we received an information that over 17,000 workers in the core civil service did not carry out the online verification which was done by the office of the Head of Service of the Federation.

Quickly we swung into action to interface with the government through the HoSF and by that singular act, there was need for us to talk to our members and that informed the reasons, because we have seen a lot of apprehensions from our members, receiving several phone calls, then we also looked at the timing because of the social economic challenges.

We went deep into the document where we also realised that even in some government agencies, we realised that names of PAs, SAs and some Ministers were included in the IPPIS portal, whereas those people were political office holders in their own rights in various regimes.