Zamfara Ghost Workers Must stay: House of Assembly.

ZAMFARA Governor Abdul’aziz Abubakar Yari and the state House of Assembly are on the warpath over an alleged plan by the government to sack 7,000 ghost workers from the civil service.

The ghost workers were identified in a recent progress report submitted to the government by a verification committee set up to authenticate the actual number of civil servants in the state.

During its report’s presentation at the Government House, Gusau, the committee told the state governor that it had identified 7,000 ghost workers in the state civil service.

The Guardian observed that during their Friday’s sitting last week, the lawmakers vowed to reject any move to sack such a high number of state workers suspected to be fake.

The lawmakers also resolved to summon the chairman of the verification committee who is also the executive chairman of the state Civil Service Commission over the progress report submitted to the government.

A motion to stop the implementation of the report was moved on the floor of the House by a member representing Mafara 2 constituency, Aliyu Ango Kagara and was seconded by a   member representing Maradun 1 Umar Muazu.

After deliberations, the House ordered the state government to ensure all categories of workers received their July salaries before tomorrow, without considering the outcome of the report submitted to it.

The chairman disclosed that his committee was able to verify workers in the state ministries, departments and government agencies.

He maintained that out of the number of 28,000 civil servants in the state, only 21,067 civil servants were captured or turned up for the verification.

According to him, if by the end of the final exercise, this number of workers refused to show up for the verification, they would be regarded as ghost workers.

According to him, the committee was able to establish that most of the appointments were abused by the immediate past administration, which conducted more than 18 recruitments in four years. .

The chairman revealed that most of those that were given appointments had forged documents. .

He therefore charged the government to take punitive action against some of these abuses as well as look into some of the findings made by the committee.

He said that there were civil servants whose names appeared on the payroll of the state government but they did not exist.

Also, he said his committee discovered that some civil servants report to their place of primary assignment only twice or thrice in a week and they would still be collecting salaries. .

Responding, the state governor maintained that whenever he received the final report of the committee only genuine civil servants would be paid their salaries.

Guardian