The Anambra State Local Government Service Commission has uncovered over 427 ghost workers receiving salaries from the state government despite not being staff members.
According to The PUNCH, Chairman of the Commission, Vin Ezeaka, disclosed this during a press briefing in Awka, the state capital, on Friday.
Ezeaka revealed that six senior employees in various local government areas had forged their certificates, falsely claiming they were issued by Imo State University.
Also the commission discovered that 59 ghost workers were former employees who had passed away long ago, 40 had retired but continued to receive salaries, and 11 others were living abroad.
He stated, “The discovery was made during a staff personnel audit launched to sanitise the local government system in the state. In the process, over 427 workers were discovered to have been on the local government payroll without being staffed.”
“Out of the 427 ‘ghost workers’ uncovered, 59 were staff of the Commission who had died a long time ago, 40 others had retired and are still on the payroll of the commission, while about 11 others were staff living abroad whose names were still on the payroll of the government,” he added.
Ezeaka further explained that among the ghost workers were some staff members of Nnamdi Azikiwe University, Awka, and Nwafor Orizu College of Education, Nsugbe.
“We also discovered 222 workers on the payroll who nobody could identify as workers in any of the 21 LGAs and we have many of them living abroad and still receiving salaries.
“We wrote to the Joint Account, JAC to remove them from the payroll. Some of them have come to voluntarily retire, but we refused because you can’t cheat the government and want to retire. We are going to finish our investigation and those we caught in this unholy act will face the full wrath of the law in accordance with civil service rules,” he asserted.
Furthermore, Ezeaka mentioned that apart from this discovery, concluded at the end of May 2024, the commission tackled the issue of certificate racketeering within the local government system.
A committee was established to investigate suspicious certificates, and out of 20 individuals who submitted Imo State University certificates, six out of 14 screened so far were found to be fake.
“We set up a committee which came up with reports of people with suspicious certificates working in various local government areas of Anambra State and we then set up a screening committee that indicted so many of them. Those indicted were identified and we started investigating the certificates they presented to the committee and went as far as going to the universities whose certificates they brandished and out of the 20 persons who tendered Imo State University certificates, we screened 14 so far, where we discovered that six out of the 14 were fake certificates,” he concluded.
