Health Minister, Isaac Adewole.

Funsho Balogun

The Federal Ministry of Health has some explanations to give to the House Of Representatives which disclosed yesterday through Abdulrazak Namdas, Chairman of the House Committee on Media and Publicity, that the ministry had not been transparent about the order it received from the Federal Government in 2014 to employ fresh hands to lessen the unemployment problem being faced by qualified graduates across the country.

According to Namdas, while other ministries complied with the directive by the Federal Government to the Federal Civil Service by absorbing a significant number of graduates into their employ, with those workers being fully remunerated right from when they started work in early 2014, the Federal Ministry of Health which claimed to have employed only 58 fresh graduates at the period failed to actually give duties or proper employment letters to them.

Worse still, the 58 workers have been put on the Ministry’s payroll since 2014, further bloating the already heavy salary allotment to the Ministry’s workforce, although they are yet to resume work.

The House of Representatives posits that their salary packages should not have been added to what the Federal Ministry of Health had been receiving from the Federal Government from the date they were supposed to have started work in 2014.

‘’The Federal Ministry of Health must now account for those monies that had been earmarked and paid into its coffers as salaries for these graduates that should have resumed work since in the Ministry but have never worked till date,’’ Namdas said.

The House of Representatives member asked the authorities of the Health Ministry to come forward with explanations regarding the employment terms and the inexplicable issue of salaries being paid monthly into the purse of the Ministry that have never reached the hands of those said to have been employed. ‘

“If there are issues, they should let us know, and this is part of the issue of accountability we are talking about,’’ Namdas noted.