The Anambra State Local Government Service Commission has sacked six deputy directors for possessing fake certificates.
The Chairperson of the commission, Vincent Ezeaka, who disclosed this, said the commission also uncovered 210 suspected ghost workers in the system, Vanguard newspaper reported.
Mr Ezeaka said the affected deputy directors claimed to have graduated from Imo State University, adding that the commission’s investigators were expecting more responses from other universities across Nigeria.
“The action is part of the commission’s quest to enthrone professionalism and eradicate all forms of corruption in the council system.
“As for the ghost workers, who cut across the 21 local government areas of the state, we have removed them from the workers’ payroll,” he said.
The chairperson said the discoveries were made possible through a dedicated back-to-back personnel audit and deployment of staff biometrics identification and verification using a state-of-the-art clock-in-clock-out digital attendance register.
He said the discovery brought to the fore the numerical strength of the physical staff in the Unified Local Government System of Anambra State, adding that certificate screening had become a continuous exercise.
Mr Ezeaka said that having completed the screening of civil servants from Grade Levels 15 and 16, the certificate screening of other workers from Grade Level 14 and below shall commence in earnest.
The chairperson explained that the exercise was aimed at “flushing out fraudsters and all forms of certificate racketeering” in the local government system.
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According to him, there had been “unrestrained looting and mismanagement of local government funds.”
He, however, said the situation had become a thing of the past since all local government accounts had been linked to a dedicated tracking system and continuously monitored by security agencies for the recovery of looted funds and prosecution of culpable officers.
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