Yobe State To Sack Ghost Workers

Oct 6, 2011 – Governor Ibrahim Gaidam of Yobe State has said that a retrenchment exercise by his administration was imminent to weed ghost workers and streamline the state’s finances.

The governor said that the state could not balance its account between the current and recurrent expenditures. He said that the action was necessary in order to “salvage the state from [the] economic quagmire characterised by corruption and embezzlement in the civil service”.

According to him, the major impediment to the state’s development plan has been unnecessary increase of redundant workers in local government councils and some government departments.

“You can imagine, Yobe State has more than 46,200 workers in 17 local governments while Kano has less than 38,500 with 44 local governments; this is absurd,” he said.

Gaidam said that recent findings of a committee revealed that majority of the workers at the local government level were ghost workers while some were employed on the basis of kinship or relationships.

“In fact, even babies are enlisted in salary payroll of local government councils,” he said.

The governor, however, said there were also more than 8,700 workers who were supposed to have retired from the service in the last three to four years but had remained in the system. “We shall sack them and deduct our money from the period they overlap,” he said.

He said that there was no going back on the retrenchment exercise, warning people not to approach him with any request regarding the exercise.

He said that it would be an injustice to be paying “unseen people” while there were many unemployed graduates in the state. Daily Times