How we reduced corruption among civil servants – HoS, Yemi-Esan

The Head of Service of the Federation, Dr. Folashade Yemi-Esan, says she has fought corruption in the Nigerian civil service space.

She said that instead of waiting for civil servants to commit the crime, her office has deviced measures to reduce the temptation.

Yemi-Esan spoke to journalists on Wednesday as part of this year’s civil service week.

Highlighting the measures taken to reduce corruption among civil servants, the HoS said, “Specifically on corruption, there are quite a number of things we’ve done. The first thing is that we work very very closely now with the ICPC and the EFCC.

“So, anytime we notice anything, even if we’ve not been able to prove it, we call them in immediately. We don’t wait until there’s a lot of sensationalism.

“Once we discover that an officer is not doing well, we call the ICPC.

“The second thing we’ve tried to do, initially we had a monkey survey to ask civil servants the most important need they had so we can work on it and divert their attention to that most important need instead of them putting their hands on things they’re not supposed to do and the thing that came out was the housing thing.

“They said if civil servants are able to have a roof over their head that would reduce the temptation and that is why we now concentrate on that. Another thing that they complained about was the salary in the civil service.

“Then, we had an increase. The Peculiar Allowance. It was peculiar to salary earners on the lower level to just lift them a bit and luckily for us, the government agreed to it.

“We’re not waiting for civil servants to do something wrong before we catch them but to reduce the temptation.

“We also have the Whistle Blower thing that when you hear something or something you either write to the office of the head of service and the anonymous reporting system.

“We’re preventing the problems instead of waiting for the issues to come out then we start running helter skelter.”