Oyo sacks over 600 adhoc staff over sundry offenses

The government said it will recruit more to replace those fired.

About half of the 1,339 members of the Youth Empowerment Scheme of Oyo state, YES-O, were on Wednesday disengaged by the state government over poor performance.

The state Commissioner for Environment and Habitat, Lowo Obisesan, made the announcement on Wednesday.

The youth were employed by the Abiola Ajimobi-led administration shortly after its inception in an effort to address unemployment among the youth in the state.

The cadets were trained and posted to relevant sections of government where they worked as traffic managers and also implemented some of the policies of the government for N10, 000 per month.

Mr. Obisesan said on Wednesday that despite government’s good intention to the cadet and residents of state, most of the beneficiaries are performing below expectation.

“When we enlisted these people, we expected they will give the people of the state and government the best, but some of them were doing the job without human face. Some of them were enforcing the law negatively. So the executive council felt some of the enlisted people were not the right ones to have been engaged,” he said.

“Investigation revealed that most of them did not have the prerequisite requirements requested. Many of them do not come to work; they go only when they want to collect bribe from people.

“Without their knowing what I had decided, I went out this morning and requested from each of their officers the attendance of the cadets, and I found out that many of them were not on duty. Today, many of them were caught and those that did not fall within the standard were told to go away. We will stop their salary and I believe that the department they work for will reject them.

“Of the 1,339 that the government enlisted, surprisingly, we hardly see 300 people. They go to the market women to collect their goods and share. Nearly 50% of them were caught and have been rejected”, Mr. Obisesan said.

He, however, added that the government intends to recruit another set of 1,000 to augment the team, but noted that it would be more careful this time around.