The governor of Cross Rivers State, Ben Ayade, has ordered for an on the spot cash payment of primary school teachers and local government workers so as to checkmate the high incidence of ghost workers and fraudulent deductions by authorities.
The governor made the order while speaking with journalists in an interactive session in his office on Monday evening, adding that it was unacceptable that somebody would commit himself to work for government for thirty days and at the end of the month, he is not paid his salary which would cause unnecessary suffering to his family.
According to him, he was not aware that while the backlog of salaries of civil servants were cleared, those of primary school teachers and local government workers were not paid alongside. He said that necessitated the directive that those set of workers be paid within the week but through table payment to eliminate the high rate of ghost workers and unnecessary deductions on their salaries.
“I have articulated the documentation and payment process for the local government workers and primary school teachers to begin this week with the April salary through on the spot table payment in the presence of forensic data system to capture each payment in order to address the high incidence of ghost workers and illegal deductions while the May and June salaries will come next week”.
According to Senator Ayade, the cash payment of salaries would aid the verification of the accurate number of workers in the state and block leakages that are in the system so that the money realised from there could be deployed in other areas of need .
“We are constructing a garment factory which should be commissioned during my first one hundred days in office and would employ over one thousand workers majority of whom shall be widows as they are the most hard hit and vulnerable in the society and ewer need money there”.
The governor also said he has concluded plans to flag off the construction of a 250 kilometres road from Calabar to Ikom through a private/ public partnership while the state will also establish a cement factory and a sea port at the high sea of Bakassi that will generate about 300 billion naira for the state annually.
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