BY MOYINOLUWA BAMIDELE-LUCAS
The board of management of the Federal Medical Centre Idi-Aba, Abeokuta has debunked a newspaper report which accused the Centre of illegal promotion and recruitment of workforce.
A newspaper had alleged in its February 17, 2022 edition that the Centre committed an infraction in its December 2021 / January, 2022 promotion exercise and illegal recruitment of personnel.
Head of its Public Relations, Segun Orisajo, explained in a statement on Sunday that contrary to the newspaper report, the Centre simply conducted a placement exercise in line with a directive from the Integrated Payroll and Personnel Information System where staff salaries were being paid.
Similarly, Orisajo said the Board absolved the Centre of complicity in any recruitment exercise explaining that what the Centre did was migration and not employment.
He said the migration exercise, which the Board stated was successfully carried out in the Centre by IPPIS was an exercise of necessity to sustain health care delivery services in the Centre.
According to the Board, as at the time the migration exercise was conducted, a good number of members of staff had contracted covid-19 and had to self-isolate.
“In the face of depletion of the workforce and in adherence to a directive by the Federal Ministry of Health not to turn back any patient, the most reasonable option left for the Centre was to migrate personnel, an action which the Board said must not be misconstrued for employment,” Orisajo added.
The Board according to him observed with regret that “the concerned” staffs of the Centre who were alleged to have being behind the petition were fictitious and none – existing.
The Board said it sounded “illogical and irreconcilable to have argued that those who had benefited from a promotion exercise could still be the ones who would later turn round to be the ” concerned staff” who authored the petition against themselves.”
The Board noted that a similar petition was issued out last year which was said to have been written by one ‘Sunday Anisere’ who purportedly claimed to be a ” concerned staff “of Federal Medical Centre Idi-Aba Abeokuta, in which investigations showed was not a staff in the Centre as there was no name in the hospital nominal roll called ‘Sunday Anisere.’
The Board, according to Orisajo therefore considered the latest newspaper report as a sponsored publication and the handiwork of disgruntled elements who are desperate in their mischievous agenda to fan the embers of disharmony, disaffection and discord in the Centre.
