20 Dead Pensioners Discovered On Government's Payroll

A committee set up by the Bauchi State Government yesterday said that it had discovered 20 dead pensioners, who are still on the government’s payroll.

Secretary of the committee set up to verify workers and pensioners without Bank Verification Numbers (BVN), Alhaji Ishiaka Tijjani, disclosed this to newsmen in Bauchi.

Tijjani said that the discovery followed the committee’s partial screening of some pensioners residing in Zaki and Katagum Local Government Councils of the state.

He said the 20 pensioners were out of 600 pensioners screened during the partial exercise, adding that they were discovered to still be on the government’s payroll and collecting their monthly benefits. “We have discovered during our assignment that about 20 pensioners out of 600 pensioners that were screened are being paid monthly benefits.

“It may interest you to know that the figure is just out of 600 pensioners, and we have a total of 9,889 pensioners that we are going to verify.

“Our discovery followed useful information given to us by the state officials of the Nigerian Union of Pensioners and we want others to emulate same,” Tijjani said.

Commenting on workers’ verification, he said that the committee had cleared 13,285 local government workers out of the over 14,632 workers earlier said to be without BVN.

Tijjani said that the committee had recommended to the state government to pay those authenticated council workers their October and November salaries.

“Three hundred and eighty council workers screened by the committee have failed to meet the committee’s requirements, while another 861 workers have either shunned or were absent during the exercise.

He also disclosed that the committee had, however, set up six sub-committees to authenticate workers that had earlier failed to appear before the committee.

The secretary said another 101 batches of state workers had been cleared and would be paid alongside the 4, 654 civil servants earlier cleared by the committee.