The Bayelsa State government has expressed worry over the non-utilization of the monthly contributory funds for housing projects in the state, threatening to pull out the state’s civil servants from the national housing scheme if drastic measures are not taken to make the scheme beneficial to enrollees.
The Deputy Governor, Lawrence Ewhrudjakpo, stated this when he granted audience to the state Chairman and other executive members of the Association of Senior Civil Servants of Nigeria (ASCSN), in his office at the Government House, Yenagoa.
Ewhrudjakpo, in a statement by his Senior Special Assistant on Media, Mr Doubara Atasi, at the weekend, decried the situation where housing deductions were being made monthly from the salary of civil servants in the state, with no single housing project on ground to justify such deductions.
Consequently, the deputy governor, who described the situation as worrisome, said the state government was weighing the option of withdrawing its employees from the national housing scheme, if operators of the scheme fail to make it effective and efficient in the no distant time.
He asserted that it does not make any economic sense to have billions piled up under the scheme, whereas nothing was being done to build houses meant for civil servants in the first place.
The deputy governor while calling on the ASCSN and other relevant labour unions to initiate action on the matter, equally directed the Commissioner for Labour, Employment and Productivity, Mr. Saturday Odoko, to interface with the relevant federal agencies and operators of the housing scheme to ascertain the true position of the deducted housing funds from civil servants in Bayelsa State.
“As a government, we are concerned and worried by some of the issues you have raised here, especially the issue of our civil servants not benefiting from the National Housing Scheme they subscribed to.
“We are aware that monthly deductions are being made from the salaries the state government pays to our civil servants to the contributory fund, and that they are not getting the benefits the way they should as spelt out in the scheme, is not acceptable.
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“And so, going forward, we will not hesitate to pull out our civil servants from the national housing scheme, if its operators failed to reposition the scheme to make it beneficial to enrollees from Bayelsa,” he said.
Earlier, the state ASCSN Chairman, Laye Julius, called on the state government to look into what was happening to funds deducted from civil servants under the national housing scheme.
Julius, who is also the state Chairman of the TUC, lamented that workers in the state have been contributing to the housing scheme since 2007, yet no single house had ever been built in Bayelsa State.
While extending an invitation to the deputy governor to deliver a lecture during the ASCSN seminar billed for next month, he equally appealed to the state government to assist the association complete its state secretariat project situated along Bayelsa Palm Road in Yenagoa.
