Kano anti-graft agency probes labour’s alleged role in employment fraud

State targets 3.2m children for polio immunisation

The Kano State Public Complaints and Anti-corruption Commission has begun investigation into the role played by labour unions in an employment fraud involving local council workers.

The ongoing screening of civil servants in the state recently uncovered over 1,000 local council workers with fake letters of employment and illegal inclusion of their names on the payroll.

Confirming the development, the Executive Chairman of the commission, Alhaji Muhuyi Magaji said preliminary investigation indicted some top officials of the labour movement in the illegal employment exercise. He, however, did not name the unions involved.

Muhuyi, while speaking with journalists said the affected workers have confessed that they paid N300,000 to some union leaders and politicians to get their employment offers.

He said the commission also discovered some workers who had transferred their services from ministries to the local council and have been receiving double salaries for three years.

According to Muhuyi: “Since the commission took over the case, we have exposed issues of illegal insertion of names, sales of employment offers which were backdated far back to 2010. We interrogated a lady who go an offer from two local councils but unknown to her the same personnel manager signed the two offers. Please how can one officer sign employment letter on behave of two councils for one person?”

The anti-corruption commission boss said: “The exercise has saved government from needless waste. Government is spending over N8 billion monthly on salaries and in some cases have to borrow from other sources to argument the salary of the workers and we have here thousands of civil servants collecting double salaries. With this discovery government will be saving not less than N1 billion.”

Attempts to confirm the involvement of labour unions in the fraud was not successful as the leadership of NLC and the National Union of Local Government Employees (NULGE) did not respond to calls to them.

Meanwhile, Governor Abdullahi Umar Ganduje has vaccinated six children to flag-off the October round of the national immunisation exercise against polio in Kano.

Declaring the exercise open at the weekend in Rano town, Ganduje pledged to ensure maximum coverage to meet the 3.2 million children population targeted for October in the state.