The biometric exercise recently introduced by Gombe State, Nigeria, has detected 668 ghost workers in two local councils and the state’s Ministries Departments and Agencies.
With the development, the state is saving N38.2m monthly in salaries.
The state’s 84 MDAs, as well as Gombe and Akko local councils are being used as experiment.
According to the Commissioner for Finance, Magaji Mohammed, the state has 67,000 workers. He promised that the exercise would soon be extended to the other nine local councils.
He said of the 668 “no show” staff so far detected, 431 were of the MDAs, 103 in Gombe Local Council and 134 in Akko.
Hinting that a data page had been created for each civil servant in the state, he said an e-file for all academic and employment record would be created for each and hosted in the cloud.
Attendance machines, he added, have been deployed to the local council while those of the LEAs would be deployed soon.
Meanwhile, Mohammed advised the residents to be prepared for a twist in the socio-economic situation in the state, as the withdrawal of the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation’s contribution to the FAAC would certainly bite on the state’s economy.
