Niger govt discovers 200 ghost workers on payroll

The Niger State government has recently discovered about 200 ghost workers on its payroll.

The state’s Commissioner for Finance, Lawal Maikano, disclosed this to journalists shortly after the ministry’s 2024 budget defence on Friday in Minna.

He said the discovery followed the deployment of technology by the government to check activities in the state civil service.

Maikano said: “Governor Umaru Bago’s administration is determined to ensure that all loopholes and leakages are blocked.

“By doing that, we are deploying technology to check these processes. We started this one or two months after we came.

READ ALSO: Nigerian govt uncovers 1,618 ‘ghost workers’ with fake employment letters

“We have knocked off about 100 to 200 names from the payroll that never existed.

“If they truly exist, we will have been having a lot of complaints that they are staff of this place and have not been paid salaries.”

He said the state employees were 25,000 and the state government was spending N2.5 billion on the payment of salaries monthly.

He pointed out that the 2024 budget of N613 billion would be financed from loans, federal allocation, revenue generation, and other sources.

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