Niger State government in North Central Nigeria, has uncovered over 2,000 illegal workers amongst its workforce.
This was the final result of findings submitted by the Salary Management Committee set up by Governor Abubakar Sani Bello.
Briefing the press on the issue, the Chairman of the Committee who is also Commissioner for Works and Infrastructural Development, Engineer Ibrahim Panti said several millions were also discovered to have been going into some fictitious spending in Ministries, Agencies and Departments MDAs across the state.
The chairman explained that out of the remaining 26,387 workers on the Governments’ payroll, only 23,624 are genuine and legal workers of the state who would be captured in the civil servants’ database.
He also revealed that 191 pending cases may scale-up, while 477 workers are placed on hold having failed to produce either their first employment letter other documents.
According to him: “After conducting the final screening exercise to further verify the staff on the 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.
“Out of the 1,230 cases rejected some are either dead, retired or on impersonation, even as 603 persons are yet to show up for the screening exercise.”
Panti further added that a 6-Man Review Committee Chaired by Commissioner for Planning, Mamman Musa has been constituted by the state Governor to look into the recommendations given by the Salary Management Committee.
It would be recalled that a total of 36,000 names of civil servants were presented to the committee when they started the screening exercise, it was brought down to 27,000 and later to 25,000 and presently to 23,624.
