The Nigeria Labour Congress, NLC, Kano Chapter, has described as ‘lies’ reports that the state government discovered 247 ghost workers in the local governments and returned N27 million to the treasury.
The state NLC Chairman, Inuwa Kabir, disputed the reports in an interview on the sidelines of Worker’s Day celebration in Kano on Thursday.
“I can authoritatively tell you that that information on local government ghost workers is not true. This is because the Department of Salary of the local governments wrote a memo that they have uncovered people who retired and their salaries are ongoing.
“Why should their salaries continue to flow?It is in local government that you will retire, send your own application for retirement. After the date that you are leaving the service, it will not be processed, and stoppage of salary is a product of processing retirement procedure, which is not done.
“You can see that nobody can stop your salary without having the necessary documents that you are exiting the service in so-so months. Those are the category of workers that are referred to as ghost-workers,” Kabir said.
“So who is collecting their salaries? Indeed they (retired workers) are the ones, because they were not enrolled in pension fund and naturally they are still workers.
“Your retirement was not processed and sent. Salary is coming. Will you hold your hand and say let me take it back? That is because you are still a worker. You are still a worker. They did not process your retirement. So that is the major reason why,” he added.
He stressed that those assumed as ghost workers are retirees who notified the state government of their retirements but the government did not process their exit from the service.
According to him, labor leaders in the state are going to the meet the government to plead on behalf of the concerned retired workers.
“Don’t take them to jail, rather they should refund what they collected,” he said.
The NLC chairman also expressed displeasure over casualization of labor in schools and hospitals, noting that the two sectors are places where there should be no casual workers.
He added, “You have to give them all you could to make sure that those places are adequately staffed, adequately equipped. While hospitals are dealing with lives, you cannot bring a casual worker and entrust the lives of people in his hands because as a casual worker, you will have the tendency of negligence. That is our fear.
“That is why we are considering it as a challenge, not to us alone as laborers, but to the society in general.
“We are calling for government to look into it and remove or convert those casual workers to full workers, whereby the authorities of those health institutions can have adequate control over them.”
