• Order Staff Audit
WORRIED by the size of its payroll, Minister of the Federal Capital Territory (FCT), Bala Mohammed, has directed a thorough staff audit of all teaching and non-teaching staff of the Education Secretariat.
Mohammed, who said the audit should be carried out through "direct table payment" of pending monthly salaries, said there could be ghost workers in the sector.
He said the directive has become necessary following observation of rising rate of redundancy, duplication, complacency and truancy in the education sector.
The minister said FCT spends about N1.6 billion monthly (45 per cent of its salary bills) to pay only staff of the secretariat, a situation he said cannot be tolerated.
He described the wage bill of the FCT as the highest in the federation, noting that the staff structure of the Education Secretariat, due to its strategic position, should be based on need.
"The total staff strength of the Education Secretariat is currently 14,000. That excludes primary school teachers and it is over-bloated," he said.
A study of the statistics of the staff structure shows that there are 252 deputy directors in the secretariat, which the Minister equally described as too high.
He said promotion should not just be done based on vacancies and need.
According to the minister, it has been observed that recent recruitment of teachers in the education sector resulted in a situation where teachers whose fields of specialisation were not needed got employed at the expense of the needed ones.
Corroborating the minister's statement, Secretary of Education, Alhaji Kabir Usman, said it was also discovered that the ratio of students to teachers in the FCT remains the lowest in the federation.
The Guardian