Gov. Kashim Shettima of Borno said the state government had uncovered more than10,000 ghost workers out of the 25,000 civil servants in the state’s work force.

The governor said in a radio and television broadcast in Maiduguri on Wednesday that the workers were uncovered after a verification to determine the actual size of the state’s work force.

“You may recall that in December 2015, while presenting the 2016 budget at the House of Assembly, I promised to embark on staff verification to determine the actual size of the state civil service.

“We set up a high powered committee chaired by the Secretary to the State Government to carry out a verification of the state civil service,” he said.

Shettima said that the committee verified only 19,763 workers out of the 25,000 workers on the state payroll.

“To finalise the exercise, a consultancy firm was hired for biometric data capture of the workers.

“As of today, 11, 397 workers have been dully captured as being bonafide staff of the state.

“Others – about 7,392 – workers have yet to be captured, out of which 4,000 workers have issues with their banks.

“There are also about 3,000 workers who failed to comply with the guidelines on the filling the verification forms,” he explained.

The governor said he had directed the committee to sort out all those issues within one week to enable the state to pay those workers already captured.

Shettima pointed out that entire salary of the 11, 397 workers captured stood at N1.129 billion as against the usual N2.7 billion.

“The entire salaries of the 11, 397 workers already captured stood at N1.129 billion; that is about N2.258 billion for the two months pending.

“I have directed the Ministry of Finance to pay the two months’ salaries to those workers.

“I have also urged them to ensure weekly payment to all those to be captured and updated as we move on.

“The two months salaries of N2,258 billion are not even up to our former N 2.7 billion wage bill for one month.

“Even if the wage bill goes to N1.7 billion or even N2 billion, we can still save up to N700 million monthly,” he said.

He commended the labour leadership in the state for its understanding throughout the verification.

•Source: Independent. Photo shows Governor Shettima.