The preliminary report of the consultant that carried out staff auditing in the 25 Local Government Areas (LGAs) of Niger State has detected no fewer than 7000 ghost? workers on the payroll of the councils.
?The? Permanent Secretary in the Ministry for Local government, Alhaji Adamu Garafini said over the weekend that a total of 26,846 staff were on the list of the 25 local government areas payroll while only 23,452 were screened and 19,296 were cleared by the consultants.
Out of the list? 3394 are fake local government staff while the rest were ghost teachers in primary schools throughout the state.
The government had hired a consultant to verify the number of workers in the local government areas of the state following the huge salary bills it has to contend with as a result of the payment of the N18,000 minimum wage.
?Garafini said that the 3394 local government workers did not appear for screening which led to the suspicion that they were ghost workers.
He revealed that the consultant also discovered that 207 staff had duplicated salary accounts into which monthly stipends are paid simultaneously while 565 were under aged having been employed when they were not up to 18 years of age.
On the cases of? the primary school teachers across the state, Garafini said that 29,778 were on the payroll out of which 26,246 were screened and 3532 did not show up for verification.
He stated further that 19,761 teachers were cleared with 620 having duplicated salary accounts and 300 employed after the government had placed embargo on employment.
The Permanent Secretary also revealed that 2,157 teachers were discovered to be unqualified even when they are performing their duties creditably while 319 are due for retirement but refused to retire.
He said that in response to the outcry from the public? the government had released over N1.9bn for the payment of the salary arrears to all category of workers in the local government areas while government white paper into the report of the consultant was being awaited for action.