Hamza Idris
20 July 2008
Damaturu — Over 7,000 civil servants working in the 17 local government areas of Yobe state have not been collecting their monthly salaries since February this year because they have not been captured by the biometric machines introduced by the state government to solve the problem of ghost workers.
The state chairman of the Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC), Comrade Mohammed Bukar, who acknowledged the sufferings of the workers in the last five months, said most of them could not be paid their entitlements because of documentation problems whereby the names of some workers were omitted during data capture by the machines while others could not be included in the payroll because certain documents were missing in their files.
He said "suspicion" by officials of the state government had aided the long delay in the payment of the civil servants which, according to him, the NLC "had regretted and accordingly apologised to the affected persons".
"In fact, we initiated the idea of using the biometric system in order to address the over blotted civil service. We appreciate that there are many irregularities in the system but it has paid off because workers now receive better pay", Comrade Bukar said.
He said following series of consultations between officials of the NLC and staff of the ministry of finance, 4,180 workers have been cleared out of the 7,000 affected civil servants, assuring that they would soon collect their salary arrears "since it has been established that they are longer ghosts".
Bukar said before the verification exercise, over 30,000 people, both real and fictitious, collected salaries worth N686 million monthly.
"The number of salary recipients has grossly reduced to 26,000 and the wage bill is now about N500,000,000".
Mohammed Kolo, a civil servant from Buni Yadi local government area, lamented that innocent civil servants have been subjected to untold hardship during the verification exercise. "For the past five months, I have not collected my salaries and I have two wives and a number of children and I am still working. How can you justify this?" he asked.
Be the first to Write a Comment!
Copyright © 2008 Daily Trust. All rights reserved. Distributed by AllAfrica Global Media (allAfrica.com). To contact the copyright holder directly for corrections — or for permission to republish or make other authorized use of this material, click here.
AllAfrica aggregates and indexes content from over 125 African news organizations, plus more than 200 other sources, who are responsible for their own reporting and views. Articles and commentaries that identify allAfrica.com as the publisher are produced or commissioned by AllAfrica.
