By Desire Emmanuel
Some employees of the Osun State government have threatened to drag a consultant that carried out a staff audit to court for declaring some of them ‘ghost workers.’
The consultant, Sally Tibbot Limited, had at a press conference accused the state government of inserting a total of 8,452 ghost workers into the state’s payroll and paying them a sum of N13,716,914,129.28 annually.
The civil servants therefore resolved to drag the company and the lead consultant to court for what they described as soiling and defaming their careers of several decades.
It was gathered that the workers across various agencies decried the alleged defamation and character assassination the consultant perpetrated by declaring them as ghost workers, vowing to seek redress in court of law.
The workers’ reaction came a day after Sally Tibbot addressed the media alleging that the Osun State government was harbouring and covering up ghost workers by refusing to implement the report of a staff audit.
A competent source in the government circle disclosed that the workers were furious that the company is still referring to them as ghost workers after they had shown up for verification and had been duly captured.
The source added that the workers had even expressed readiness to show themselves to the company as genuine workers with records of years of service with the state government.
The workers were said to have blamed the consultant for messing up the staff audit by its alleged maltreatment of workers and many top civil servants as well as alleged refusal to decentralised the auditing exercise.
Reacting to the development, the state government debunked the allegation of cover up and described the press briefing by the company as a subtle blackmail to force staff audit report on the state.
The state government said the unusually high number of alleged ghost workers by the consultant led to a re-verification exercise which revealed extensive inflation of the figure and which showed that those the company claimed were ghost workers were legitimate civil servants.
