John Adams, Minna
Ongoing Niger State staff verification committee said it has uncovered no fewer than 333 dead civil servants on the payroll of the state government.
The committee also said not less than N207 million was being paid to the “dead civil servants” every month, amounting to about N5 billion in two years.
Ibrahim Mohammed Panti, chairman of the Staff Verification Committee set up to fish out ghost workers disclosed this in a live radio programme monitored in Minna, yesterday.
This revelation came barely a week after government ordered the dismissal of civil servants who have been earning salaries equivalent to that of commissioners.
Panti said those involved in the scam were account officers and other staff mostly from the health ministry. He disclosed these account officers were among the 80 civil servants sacked last week.
“Out of the purported 27,000 civil servants on the pay roll of the state government, only 15,907 have been discovered to be our genuine workers so far. There are 3,923 workers from different ministries still having pending issues and are still being investigated. These set of people had entered the state civil service with fictitious certificates. Within the last two years, 333 civil servants who had been certified dead were still drawing salaries from the state government and all these fraud must stop.”
He pointed out that 1, 029 civil servants whose names were on the payroll were yet to appear before the committee for screening, stressing that “by today, which is the end of the screening, they will be officially declared as ghost workers if they refused to appear before the screening committee.”
He said besides being dismissed, all those found guilty will also be prosecuted pointing out that unlike before, “the present revelations are too weighty to be swept under the carpet.”