Segun Babatunde in Bauchi
The Bauchi State Government says it has identified and removed 1,279 staff from the payroll of the ministry of health as part of efforts to sanitize the nominal payroll system of the state.
The State Governor, Senator Bala Abdulkadri Mohammed who stated this yesterday during an public parley with stakeholders on problems associated with the management and payment of salaries of civil servants, held at the Command Guest House Bauchi, said that among the health workers removed from the payroll are 100 doctors.
Governor Mohammed said that Bauchi State is facing a monumental task of sorting out what is clearly a corrupted salary regime, adding that the state civil service has suffered from systematic attrition which is bastardized by fraudulent practices and outright corruption.
“What appeared to be a first simple issue of santizing the nominal and payroll and sorting out the arithmetics, suddenly turned out to be a problem and seems to defy all nominal formula that will bring solution. The problem is much more challenging than I envisiaged”
“In the year 2015, the salary bill of Bauchi State, both state and local government was N4.5 billion, as I address you today, we are nearing N7 Billion.We have not employed at all, even when civil servants have died or retired, but we still continue to experience spontaneous rise in the payment of salaries”.
“In the ministry of education, we have 6,000 staff reflected on the payroll while the Head of Service has a record of 5,000 staff which was sent four days ago to the ministry.There is the case of 110 staff whose salaries were stopped from the state treasury due to inconsistencies recorded between their nominal and payroll records” he said
Earlier in his presentation, the State Commissioner of Finance, Umar Sanda Adamu said that when Governor Mohammed came into office in May 2019, he made a promise to sanitize the payroll of the state civil service because the number of civil servants in the state was overbloated .
He said that the Governor set up a committee to look into the problem of ghost workers and sanitize the payroll, adding that findings of the committee was mind boggling where one person collected double salaries and insertion of names of persons that were not supposed to be in the payroll. END