MONROVIA – One hundred and thirty-two officers of the Liberia Immigration Service (LIS) risk being retired without any immediate benefits and this comes at the behest of the Civil Servant Agency (CSA) which has requested the Immigration Service to retire these officers.
In the CSA request to the LIS, they threatened that these officers’ names will be removed from the payroll if LIS fails to implement the request by the end of August of 2021. This disclosure was made by the deputy LIS Commissioner Administration Moses Yebleh.
During his appearance before the Senate Ways, Means and Finance Committee to defend his entity’s budget for the next budget year, Commissioner Yebleh asked members of the Senate to intervene by delaying the retirement to next year at which time preparations will be made to handsomely retire those officers who have served their country.
“Honorable Senators we have a major concern that could even affect the budget if not addressed. It could take off your time. As we speak, we have the CSA again that has written us to retire 132 of our officers without doing planning for replacement.
“Honorable Senators, the retirement that was done last year, the handshake packages for those retirees didn’t take effect until June this year. It brought about a lot of disruption in our activities, caused by protestation. We have been told if we don’t do this those officers will be removed from the payroll at the end of this month. We want the recruitment and retirement process to go hand-in-hand.”
He told the Senators the LIS isn’t against retirement but wants the recruitment planning process and retirement be done together because if these activities are not taken care of, it will disrupt the security of the country.
He further said; “We didn’t expect that retirement will be every two-three months. We expected that the next retirement will be done next year because we have had two retirements in recent time. It is not a fine way for people who have worked for their country for over 25 years to be told one morning that their services will no longer be needed without any benefits until after one year.
“As we speak the pressure and threats are on us because an audit done by the IAA has taken some of our active men in arms off the payroll. Some of these people are assigned to faraway areas. Some of these people are armed carriers at the boarders. If the people work for months and are told they cannot be paid is a threat to our lives,” he said.