59 dead persons, 341 others at large collecting salaries across Anambra LGAs  

About 400 ghost workers have been identified in the Anambra State Local Government Service Commission.

Out of the number, 59 are said to be deceased, five living abroad, and 40 pensioners still drawing salaries.

Several individuals were said to be involved in certificate fraud, with investigations completed on six cases so far.

This was disclosed on Friday in Awka by the chairman of the commission, Vin Ezeaka,

Ezeaka revealed that the ghost workers were discovered across the 21 local government areas in the state.

The investigation was aimed to sanitize the local government system.

Ezeaka said, “We discovered 59 deceased staff who are still receiving salaries, 40 retirees also receiving salaries, and above all, we discovered 222 workers on the payroll who nobody could identify as workers in any of the 21 Council areas.

“And we have many of them living abroad and still receiving salaries, so 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 government and want to retire.

“We are going to finish our thorough investigation and those caught in this unholy act will face the full weight of the law in accordance with civil service rules.

“Apart from this discovery, at the end of May 2024, something dramatic happened, we descended on the Certificate racketeering cartel within the local government system.

“We set up a committee which came up with a report 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 said two other persons who retired from the Commission got employed in two different Higher Institutions in the state and were still receiving salaries.

“We are waiting for the Committees to conclude their investigations, then we move into action. I want to be thorough and that is why the governor appointed me. The system is bleeding” Ezeaka said