Governor Ademola Adeleke of Osun state has sacked 12 thousand workers hours after being sworn in as the 6th executive governor of Osun state. According to the governor, all appointments made by his predecessor after 17 July 2022, the day after his electoral victory, were not valid. While this move is laudable, it also comes with the consequences of increased unemployment.
The federal government through the National Bureau of Statistics recently announce that over 130 million Nigerians are impoverished. With the announcement of the sack of over 12 thousand civil servants in Osun recently, the number of out of work people in the state has definitely increased.
Such a massive sack should not have been hastily carried out by the new government. If at all the new administration feels that the process of their employment was shady and politically motivated, what it should have done was to constitute a committee to filter out unqualified ones. 12 thousand is not a small figure, imagine the thousands of mouths that depend on these workers for their daily survival.
Governor Ademola Adeleke may have gotten it right by clamping down on the bad habit of last minute shady employments by many outgoing governors. You cannot employ 12 thousand workers a day after losing an election and expect the new government not to probe it.
Such shady act can increase the burden of the incoming administration. The new government will be left with the burden of sourcing funds to pay the salaries of the new workers. But, sacking all of them at once will only increase the unemployment figures in the state.
Osun State is a civil servant state. What this means is that, the state government is the biggest employer of both direct and indirect labour. What the new administration of Ademola Adeleke should do to remedy this situation is to set up a committee to properly scrutinize whether these workers posses the necessary qualifications and skills to merit their employment.
The committee’s role will be to ascertain if the state was truly in need of their services, and that the employment was not just a shady attempt by the former governor to frustrate the new administration.