State govts are to blame for ghost workers’ syndrome, says NLC

The Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC) says state governments and employers are to blame for the ghost workers’ syndrome in the country’s public service.

Ayubba Wabba, the NLC president, said this in an interview with NAN in Abuja.

Wabba said once the computer system used to capture the biometric data of workers was compromised, the data collected would become unreliable.

“The ICT system is about garbage in, garbage out,” he said.

“Once the system is compromised at any point in time, it then makes the entire data actually unreliable. And, therefore, this is a conspiracy at the highest level of state governments and even employers.

“It is not the workers that encourage this issue of ghost worker’s syndrome.” No! It is employers at the highest level.

“I am aware that some state governments take out money in the name of workers’ salary through this ghost workers syndrome. Therefore, this same government will be the people now to engage consultants to do biometric capturing whereas they know what is happening.

“Therefore, it has not yielded any desired results. If we want actually to eliminate ghost workers entirely in our system – it is not possible to do that – but there must be commitment on the part of our government.’’

Garba Shehu, President Muhammadu Buhari’s senior special assistant on media and publicity, said recently that the federal government had identified 50,000 ghost workers in its payroll.

He said the move saved the country N200 billion.

He described ghost workers’ syndrome as another form of corruption, saying: “In fact, it is a glorified way of corruption, where state governments and other employers of labour use the payroll.”

He said that the syndrome had been discovered in the Nigeria Air Force payroll, where bogus names were included by corrupt officials.

The NLC president, therefore, called on the federal government to ensure that the capturing of workers’ biometric data is not manipulated.

“If certainly they really want to eliminate this ghost workers’ syndrome, they can do it,” he said.

“Let there be a joint effort by the organised labour and the government, because once they are not committed to it, that means we’ll still have the issue of ghost workers coming up every now and then.”