Following the verification exercise, which is being conducted for all strata of workers in the employ of Kwara State government, officials of government have uncovered fraud in the recruitment of teachers into the State Teaching Service Commission.
BusinessDay reports that official document made available to some section of the media in Ilorin on Sunday indicated that approval was only given for the employment of 449 teachers by the state government between 2014 and 2015, but a total of 965 teachers were employed with an inflated figure of about 516 teachers.
The fraud, according to the official documents, was discovered, having found massive discrepancies in the employment forms submitted and approvals granted for the employment, which suggested that huge funds had been lost to the salary payments of those individuals uncovered as the government weighs option of imposing necessary sanctions on the perpetrators.
Addressing journalists in Ilorin on Sunday, Musa Ayinla Yeketi, commissioner for education and human capital development, said several irregularities were discovered in the course of employing personnel into the teaching service in 2014, explaining that the employment of 965 staff members went contrary to the approval of the state government, which approved only 449 teachers for employment.
Yeketi, who spoke alongside his counterpart, Mahmud Babatunde Ajeigbe, information and communications as well as permanent secretary in the ministry of education, Ayo Garuba, assured that the ongoing screening was not to victimise anyone, but to ascertain the level of compliance with the due process.
Yeketi said there was no iota of truth in the rumour that the exercise was targeted at “throwing some people into the labour market to pave way for the commissioner’s cronies in the Kwara State Teaching Service Commission.”
He further explained that no decision had been taken on the mind boggling revelations, pointing out that the government was interested in going into the root cause of the fraudulent conduct, just as he said that no effort would be spared to unmask the masterminds of the fraud.
