By Ruth Yarnap, Bauchi
In his determination to sanitize the nominal payroll system of the state, Bauchi state Governor,Bala Abdulkadri Mohammed says his administration has identified and removed 1,279 staff from the payroll of the ministry of health .
Governor Bala disclosed this on Thursday during a public parley with stakeholders on problems associated with the management and payment of salaries of civil servants, held at the Command Guest House Bauchi, saying that among the health workers removed from the payroll are 100 doctors in the state.
He said that his administration is facing a monumental task of sorting out what is clearly a corrupted salary regime, noting that the state civil service has suffered from systematic attrition which is bastardized by fraudulent practices and outright corruption.
According to him, “what appeared to be at first a simple issue of sanitizing the nominal payroll and sorting out the arithmetic, suddenly turned out to be a major problem and seems to defy all nominal formula that will bring solution. The problem is much more challenging than I envisaged,” he said.
“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.”
The Governor added, “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”.
In his speech, the State Commissioner of Finance, Umar Sanda Adamu said that when Governor Mohammed came into office in May 2019, he assured that he will sanitize the payroll of the state civil service because the number of civil servants in the state was overbloated.
According to him, 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 there are insertions of names of persons that are not supposed to be in the payroll.
The Commissioner commended the governor for organising the public parley with stakeholders that will bring an end to the problem of non-payment of salaries of civil servants in the state.
