Niger State government in North Central Nigeria, has uncovered over 2,000 illegal workers amongst its workforce following a final submission by the Salary Management Committee recently set up by the government.
The Chairman of the Committee who is also Commissioner for Works and Infrastructural Development, Engineer Ibrahim Panti, briefed the press on Thursday,that several millions were also discovered to have been going into some fictitious spending in Ministries, Agencies and Departments MDAs across the state.
Panti explained that out of the remaining 26,387 only 23,624 are genuine and legal workers the state has and would be captured in the civil servants data base.
“After conducting the final screening exercise to further verify the staff on government’s payroll, we discovered 2,764 have different names, using different banks with the same BVN being paid salaries.
“The committee reported that out of 26,000 benchmark given, only 23,624 were cleaned and cleared to have met the requirements as Civil Servants”, he said.
Panti further said that 191 pending cases may scale up, while 477 workers are placed on hold as they couldn’t produce either their first employment letter other documents.
It should be noted that about 36,000 names of civil servants was presented to the committee during the initial screening, but was brought down to 27,000, 25,000 and now to 23,624.
The Chairman of the screening committee however said a six-man Review Committee to be Chaired by Commissioner for Planning, Mamman Musa has been set up to look into the recommendations of the Salary Management Committee.
Nneka Ukachukwu
